I came upon a very interesting post on the vista knowledgebase blog where the author was describing a very unusual behavior that he experienced with Windows Vista. She apparently was running a legit, fully activated copy of Windows Vista and decided to install the upcoming mmorpg game 9 Dragons which is currently in Open Beta phase.

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You got 30 days to activate your windows operating system, once the time period is over you can’t log into Windows anymore and most users feel a little desperate. What can they do to access their important files, where can they find help about this problem ? Steve discovered a clever way to access the internet and file folders from the login screen of an expired windows installation.

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According to the website apcmag “pirates” were able to crack the vista activation server. As you all know every Windows Vista edition has to be activated, even the enterprise editions which was not the case in Windows XP. Imagine a company with thousands of computers all running Windows Vista. It would probably take some time to activate each on its own. The clever folks at Microsoft wanted to make it more comfortable for their business clients and created the so called Key Management Service.

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You have thirty days to activate a new installation of Microsoft Windows XP before it stops working until you finally activated the installation. Activation works this way that you have to provide an installation number to Microsoft either by internet or by phone. If you change hardware or install the operating system again you will have to activate the product again as well. This does not make sense in my opinion but hey, they surely have an important reason for this procedure.

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