Run a legal Vista copy for 120 days without activation

Date: 19 February 2007	Issue: Two hundred and twenty-three (19/2/07 - 23/2/07) (ICT World)
Category: Global News	Gregg Keizer, Computerworld (US online)

Windows Vista can be used for as long as 120 days without agreeing to its product activation anti-piracy software, the company confirms. That is four times as long as the 30 days the company has widely used as the maximum time span the operating system can be used before it shuts down.

Several bloggers and Windows experts, including Brian Livingston, who publishes the Windows Secrets newsletter, have posted details on how to extend the 30-day grace period a maximum of three times, for 120 days.

"All versions of Vista allow a 30-day period without activation, except the corporate-oriented Vista Enterprise, which supports only a three-day trial," says Livingston in the latest issue of his newsletter. "If you know the secret, however, you can extend the activation deadline of editions such as Vista Home Premium and Vista Business up to four months past the original install date."

The one-line command of "slmgr -rearm" changes the activation deadline to 30 after the current date, Livingston says.

A Microsoft spokeswoman confirms the feature and command. "Yes, 'rearm' can be run up to three times from the release media from Microsoft," she says. "This means [that] a total of 120 days total time is available as a grace period to customers that take advantage of rearm."

Microsoft has documented this option on its Vista Volume Activation 2.0 support site. Although the bulk of the technical information posted is aimed at corporate administrators, the sections dealing with repeated activation also apply to consumer users of the operating system.

Extending the grace period, the spokeswoman continues, is not a violation of the Vista End User Licence Agreement (EULA). Microsoft introduced product activation in 2001's Office XP and next used it in that year's Windows XP.

The feature was toughened up for Vista, however; after the grace periods, non-activated PCs running Vista drop into what Microsoft calls "reduced functionality" mode. In reduced mode, users can only browse the Web with Internet Explorer, and then only for an hour before being forced to again log on.

Some critics have argued that the new activation rules and reduced functionality combine to make what's essentially a "kill switch" - a way for Microsoft to disable PCs running counterfeit copies of Vista. Microsoft has repeatedly rejected that characterisation.