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You probably know that you can reset the grace period up to three times with the command slmgr -rearm. This “rearming” allows you to run Vista without license key up to four months. It seems that Brian Livingston has found a method to prolong this period indefinitely using the SkipRearm registry setting.
VAMT is a free Microsoft tool that helps companies manage Vista activation using MAKs (Multiple Activation Key). It is also useful for organizations working with KMS. VAMT has four core features: Status Collection and Reporting, MAK management, MAK Independent Activation, and MAK Proxy Activation. In this post, I’ll only cover the first two features. I’ll write about MAK Independent Key Activation and MAK Proxy Activation soon.
Many new IT news sites and blogs reacted to this article on KezNews which claims that it is possible to get a valid Vista product key using a brute-force-attack. Although it is quite obvious, that it is almost mathematically impossible to get a valid key this way much sooner than the next big bang, many seem to be excited about cracking Microsoft’s WGA (I call it Windows Genuine Activation mess).
Some days ago, I introduced KMS (Key Management Service) as one option to activate Vista in a corporate environment. Today, I’ll summarize the most important facts about MAK (Multiple Activation Key), the second option.
Some days ago, I reported that we were having problems activating KMS on a Windows Server 2003. It turned out that we accidently exceeded the number of possible KMS installations. You can only activate 6 KMS hosts with one KMS key, each with up to 9 reactivations. I was quite surprised to hear that we have already 6 KMS hosts installed. Actually, I thought my test system is the first one. So how did we get 6 KMS installations?
Please note that the instructions here only contain the essentials of KMS (Key Management Service) installation. In uncommon network configurations, for example, if you can’t use DNS auto-discovery, you have to consult Microsoft’s documentation.
VAMT is an important tool if you plan to activate Vista using MAK keys instead of working with KMS. I just saw it now, but it has been available for three days, already. The Windows Vista Hardware Assessment solution Accelerator is an inventory, assessment, and reporting tool which allows you to determine if the computers in your network are Vista-ready.
If you’re a Windows administrator, you would certainly know already that even business customers have to activate Windows Vista. There are several ways to do it, and KMS will probably be the one that most companies will use. Microsoft’s own documentation is a bit long winded because it also covers uncommon cases. In this post, I summarized the most important facts about KMS. It will help you get an overview of the activation procedure via KMS.
Joe Wilcox from Microsoft Watch interviewed David Lazar, director of Microsoft’s Genuine Windows initiative, about “Vista’s validation approach“. Did you know that Vista has to phone home every 180 days to reassure that you really, really paid your debts to Microsoft? This is what I call paranoia.
I just stumbled upon Microsoft’s technical guidance for Windows Vista Volume Activation 2.0. Oh my! Taking the length of the documents into account, this seems to be more complicated than deploying Vista.
Today, I wanted to update Vista RC1 to RC2. When I booted up, Vista informed me that I have to activate it before I can logon. Unfortunately, I used a private IP. So Vista Activation wasn’t able to phone home. No problem you say? Just enter a public IP and go ahead. But how can you do that without logging on?
You probably know that Microsoft validates your Windows XP, every time you install an update. The German magazine PC Professionell (08/06) has an interesting article (print) about recent changes in this validation process. It seems that WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) is now contacting Microsoft daily.
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