Trial license expiry?!

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hi,

I am about to embark on MCSA territory and shall be using vmware to do this.. I was just wondering if I install an OS using the supplied 120 day trial, if I take a snapshot of it right after installation, I can keep going back to it without reinstalling?!

Thanks

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Only if you want to use it for no more than 14 days before it asks you to activate the product.

 

ah simon what i think he is saying (and i have thought about this myself).. you install the guest OS.. it beens to be activated right? what if take the snapshot just after installing it then after the trial or activation is near just restore the snapshot?

 

Try it! I have, it didn't work!

You think that MS didn't think about things like that when they thought up Bloomin Activation!

 

so the only solution is reinstalling and never activating?

 

No. The only solution to reusing trial versions is to reformat the hard drive. MS hides the install date and timer so deeply in the registry that you can't find it and change it. You can only reset it by destroying the entire thing.

It's like installing a piece of shareware that has a time limit on it before it stops working. You can uninstall it and use a registry cleaner to clean up all references to it, but you'll never be able to use that software once it expires unless you reformat and reinstall your OS. There's a counter in there somewhere but I've never been able to find them.

Harry might know where/how it's hidden as he's done development for so many years that it's possible that he's been in on a project like this but I sure don't.

 

I had to do that when writing the server book. I kept blowing away the VM servers and reinstalling to avoid the problem.

 

It will be timestamped in the registry as far as I'm aware.

 

I think we're all aware of that. It's where in the registry that it's timestamped that is the problem. You can't clean time stamps for any shareware with a registry cleaner and I've never yet found a time stamp that was visible through manual searching of the registry, and I've done some looking out of curiousity just to see if I could find one.

Time stamps for the OS and for shareware are very well hidden. If they weren't people would bypass them regularly, and it just doesn't happen. You can Google lots of cracked authentication codes, but I have have never Googled a way to bypass time stamps.

If you know of a way I'd be curious to see it. Not that I would use it because OSS has no need of them, but just to see if I've just been completely wrong on this.

 

Actually Ffreeloader not everyone will be aware of that as everyone isn't an expert like you...

 

LOL

The day I become an expert is a day far in the future, Slypie....