Will Chatham

For the last few weeks, the techie blogs have been cir­cu­lat­ing sto­ries about how Microsoft Win­dows Vista can be installed and used for free for 120 days. You see, Microsoft gives you 30 days to try it out for noth­ing, but then they will dis­arm it and require you to pur­chase a license to con­tinue using it.

Some­one found out that Microsoft had built in a way to extend that 30 trial to 120 days through a lit­tle reg­istry tweak.

Well, now some­one has fig­ured out how to extend it indef­i­nitely, not by hack­ing or crack­ing the oper­at­ing sys­tem, but by using the built-in tools that Microsoft included in the oper­at­ing system.

From DailyCupOfTech.com:

“It appears that crack­ers need not break Win­dows Vista acti­va­tion because Microsoft has done it for them! Brian Liv­ingston of Win­dow Secrets writes in Microsoft allows bypass of Vista acti­va­tion about how to allow you to keep your Vista box run­ning indef­i­nitely with­out acti­vat­ing it.“

It is likely that MS will try and fix this through some future patch, but what will they break in doing so? They obvi­ously had a need to pro­vide this func­tion­al­ity for some reason.

Now that I’ve aban­doned Winders on the home desk­top com­pletely for Red­Hat Fedora linux, this makes me chuckle. How­ever, maybe I’ll give it a shot and see what happens!