How To Activate Windows Vista Without Product Key

[Margaretha Palone]

Microsoft describes its product activation scheme as a way to foil software pirates. However, as I previously described in an InfoWorld Magazine article on Oct. 22, 2001, activation does nothing to stop mass piracy. The Redmond company actually included in Windows XP a small file, Wpa.dbl, that makes it easy for pirates to create thousands of machines that validate perfectly.

Far from stopping software piracy, product activation has primarily been designed to prevent home users from installing one copy of Windows on a home machine and a personal-use copy on a laptop. As I explained in an article on Mar. 8, buying a copyrighted work and making another copy strictly for personal use is specifically permitted to consumers by the U.S. Copyright Act and the copyright laws of many other countries.

For example, courts have repeatedly ruled that consumers can make copies of copyrighted songs or television programs for personal use (not for distribution or resale). This principle is legally known as "fair use." The home edition of Microsoft Office 2007 reflects this principle, allowing consumers to activate three copies of a single purchased product. Microsoft Windows XP and Vista, however, allow only one activation.

Step 3. Right-click the Registry key named SkipRearm and click Edit. The default is a Dword (a double word or 4 bytes) with a hex value of 00000000. Change this value to any positive integer, such as 00000001, save the change, and close the Registry Editor.

Activation of Windows XP, by comparison, requires merely that volume purchasers use a single product key. Corporate buyers obtain a unique key when signing a Volume Licensing Agreement. Microsoft has said, however, that most Windows XP piracy involves stolen product keys that are used by others to activate unauthorized machines.

To work around this, as a Technet document states, "Microsoft recommends that you use the SkipRearm setting if you plan on running Sysprep multiple times on a computer." This is echoed by Microsoft Knowledge Base article 929828.

First, use a free connection analyzer to find out exactly what your optimum settings should be. Then, use a free tweaking tool to actually make the changes.
Optimizing your network connections

Windows Secrets reader "abcalvin" wondered about some of the less obvious settings Windows uses for its networking setups:

Windows uses generic default settings for its networking setups, and these settings usually work acceptably, but barely. Replacing the generic settings with settings that are custom tailored to your specific needs can yield a huge improvement in your online throughput speeds.

Licensing does allow for upgrades. If you have an original, OEM-licensed copy of Windows on your PC, you can upgrade it with a later version. The original version is the "qualifying product" that makes the upgrade legitimate. The upgrade inherits this legitimacy, but then remains tied to the original PC.

Even more reader mail poured in, leading to "Cold weather can damage hard drives" in the Mar. 1 issue. Like ripples on a pond, reader mail is still coming in from distant places like Finland and Greece.

"As part of our disaster recovery policy, we ensure that tapes not in tape devices be offsite temporarily or permanently as much as practically possible. This means the tapes are daily potentially exposed to extremely low/high temperatures and humidity, as well as to possible rapid temperature and humidity changes.

"For what it is worth, I do not think that any backup problems that we have are related to humidity, low temperatures (tapes are brought into the office in the morning and will have reached room temperature by the time of the evening backup) or high temperatures (again, tapes are brought into the office in the morning, when temperatures are still relatively low.) Can you give me and other readers your thoughts?" Tapes can last for decades, if properly cared for in controlled, archival environments. But in typical real-world office use, the life is much shorter. For example, cold temperatures can make the tape more susceptible to breaking, and high temperatures or high humidity can cause the adhesives that bind the magnetic oxides to the tape to change for the worse.

Fred Langa edited the LangaList e-mail newsletter from 1997 to 2006, when it merged with Windows Secrets. Prior to that, he was editor of Byte Magazine and editorial director of CMP Media, overseeing Windows Magazine and others.

There are several tools available, Jamie. I know of two for standalone computers. The first is Instant Message Grabber, which records conversations to the computer disk. You can configure a password that is required in order to access the conversation logs. The product costs $34.95.

One big issue I do see with this tool is that you must give up some amount of control over your computer. Depending on how the school configures its use of Cisco NAC, the administrator of the school network could either force changes into your systems or let you decide to make the changes yourselves.

Sarah, if you like ZoneAlarm security products, then maybe switching is a good idea. The device offers a stateful inspection firewall (which is better than the typical firewall found in wireless routers today), antivirus software, intrusion detection, and other nifty features like remote desktop control.

Irving, the answer is yes. You can remove older versions of Java without causing any problems. There is, however, the outside chance that removing an older version of Java might break one of your applications that relies on that older version.

While the security community is wrapped up with rumors of Vista patching problems, older Windows operating systems still have plenty of flaws that need fixing.
Print Spooler service can cause DoS

The Print Spooler service in Windows (spoolsv.exe) is vulnerable to a remote denial of service (DoS) attack. The flaw could allow a hacker to use up almost all available memory on a computer by sending an RPC (Remote Procedure Call) request. No administrative rights are required to use this exploit, and there have already been three publicly available exploits released for the flaw since it was discovered.

This flaw was first discovered in November 2006 and has been confirmed on a fully patched Windows 2000 system. Other operating systems may also be vulnerable, but so far there has been no evidence of this since the flaw was discovered.

What to do: Exploiting this flaw requires a hacker to have access to your computer over a network or the Internet. To protect yourself, one option is to disable the Print Spooler service. This can be done as follows:

The Over the Horizon column informs you about threats for which no patch has yet been released by a vendor. Chris Mosby recently received an MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award from Microsoft for his knowledge of Systems Management Server. He runs the SMS Admin Store and is a contributor to Configuring Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition.

The MSRC (Microsoft Security Response Center) has never considered service packs to be security patches. But service packs are definitely security-related in my mind, whether MS chooses to call them that or not.

For most of those who were impacted, this was caused by not running the Outlook "rebasing" tool. This utility looks at the appointments in your calendar and allows you to move them to the proper time. You can download the tool from the Microsoft download site.

Now I installed official Windows 10 Pro, but it obviously doesn't activate. At least legally, because activating via pirate KMS still works, but it's not what I need. I'm entitled to free upgrade as legal, registered Windows 7 owner.

Since I don't have whole day to waste for it - is there a shortcut? I'm looking for a way to use my Windows 7 product key to activate my Windows 10 upgrade. I'm positive it's possible, but it requires some magic. Any clues?

Here's my guess, when you do normal upgrade procedure you get new product key for Windows 10 based on the product key you had for previous Windows version. The old key has to be validated first. My question is: how to achieve it using only existing Windows 10 installation? Maybe I could install Windows 7 on virtual machine, activate it and somehow get the new product key from VM? Anyone tried that?

The Windows 10 upgrade stores your machine ID on Microsofts servers. This means that if you decide to do a clean install at a later point in time, you do not have to type in any product key and that you can just skip it during installation. After installing it will then activate itself (This may take a while.. Took a few hours and some restarts for me).

I actually decided to test this yesterday when installing, so when I was finished upgrading to Windows 10 I extracted the new product key from my registry and then I tried to do a clean install using that key. Sadly the Windows 10 installer doesn't recognize that key as valid.

In short: It doesn't look like there's any "magic" way to circumvent the upgrade method on the first install, since you need to get your machine ID up on Microsofts servers to be able to activate your Windows 10 installation.

Update:You could try to contact Microsofts support. Apparently a few people have had success getting them to upgrade your existing key to a Windows 10 key - Haven't tried it myself though so I can't confirm it.

Starting a certain tool in the Windows 10 setup folder: get a Windows 10 using Microsoft's downloader on a flash drive, then follow the procedure from: _need_for_a_full_upgrade_to_install_10_from/ (copying source\gatherosstate.exe to a directory with write permissions and running it in order to retrieve a "GenuineTicket.xml" file to be copied into a fresh Win 10 Installation without any keys entered during setup. The folder where it has to be copied to being "c:\programdata\microsoft\windows\clipsvc\genuineticket\", after a reboot the installation should be activated.

c80f0f1006