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.