ghacks Technology News

Extend Vista Activation Period to 12 Months


It is getting better and better. I was describing a method to extend the activation period of Windows Vista by 90 days to a total activation period of 120 days. But this is actually not the maximum that you can extend the activation period of Windows Vista. Ryan from Cybernet wrote a nice article today that explains how every Windows Vista user can extend the activation period by the factor three raising the total time until Windows Vista has to be activated to 360 days.

The first steps are basically the same as before. Run the command prompt as an administrator, you can do this by starting cmd and pressing CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER. Type “slmgr -rearm” and hit return. The activation period will be reset to another 30 days after a reboot. To check if this procedure was successful you can type “slmgr -xpr” at the same command prompt after the reboot.

This was the usual way of extending the Windows Vista activation period from 30 to 120 days. We are now going to increase this period by the factor two again to have 360 days to activate Windows Vista. Open the registry with “regedit” and navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ SL

Right-click the SkipRearm key and choose to modify it. Change the value to 1 and close regedit again. Start the command prompt as an administrator again and type “slmgr -rearm” again. Reboot the pc again and the Vista activation period was again reset to another 30 days. This can be done eight times.

To outline it again:

  • slmgr -rearm as an administrator in the Windows Vista command prompt (3 times)
  • change SkipRearm to 1 in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ SL
  • slmgr -rearm as an administrator in the Windows Vista command prompt (both 8 times)

This extends the Windows Vista activation period to 360 days.




Tags: , , , , ,
Categories: Hacking, Operating Systems, Windows



Related posts:

Extend the Vista activation period
How to bypass Vista activation
Vista to automatically revoke activation ?
Got no Vista key ? Bruteforce one !
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 RC1 Available
Clean Install Windows 7 With Windows 7 Upgrades
Extend Windows Vista Laptop Battery Life With Aerofoil
Vista: Disable UAC for selected applications

11 Responses to “Extend Vista Activation Period to 12 Months”

  1. Albert says:

    I’m pretty sure Microsoft will soon release an update that will not allow this command to be run. I can only imagine how much money they are losing, or what will happen to their stock when this ends up on the news.

  2. ilo says:

    There will allways be a crack :D

  3. Rado says:

    This is a great tip.
    However I will stay with WinXP for a while, right now I can’t see any advantages of Vista…

  4. Kelly says:

    Which is the SkipRearm key ?

  5. vasu says:

    yes cracking of software not means cheating it means how you secure your product frome outsider/hacker.

  6. nette says:

    does this same trick work for XP?

  7. michael says:

    hey nette, go to youtube.com and look up windows XP activation crack then take a look at some of the vids, there is one video in particullar and LOOK AT THE COMMENTS!!! some of these are virus’s i will not lie but i did one of these bc the comments said they worked and guess what..it worked!!!!!!!i opened the windows activation thingy(give me a break im a kid) and it said windows has already been activated…yeah it was kool(give me another break i am still a kid i didnt get older during this comment posting

  8. Ben says:

    Well i need some real help!
    My 30 days are up and i’ve lost my product key and i downloaded Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder and it found a key and i put it in and it said please enter a another key and it didnt say it was wrong and i just dont know so if anybody could help me?

  9. shant says:

    can i update windows after the first 30 days?

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. [...] todavía siguen sin activar Windows Vista por “a” o “b” motivos, ghacks nos muestra una nueva manera para poder seguir utilizando el sistema operativo sin problemas de activación [...]

Leave a Reply   Follow Ghacks   Subscribe To Comment Rss

© 2005-2009 Ghacks.net. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - About Us