Let's suppose that you have a licensed copy of an Windows Vista/7 but lately you have installed-activated/uninstalled it for several times. At some point the Microsoft Activation Server just get bored and says "OK, if you want me to activate your license then please pick up the phone and call me!".
What if you get bored (or you are just lazy) to call Microsoft and to justify yourself and to ask them "Please, can you activate the copy that I bought legally? Yes, I have an invoice, in fact I have 10 invoices because it happens that I bought more copies than I'm using right now. No, I'm not a software theft, I cross my heart and hope to die!"
Well, in that situation (let me make myself clear: when you both have the legal right to use that piece of software and you don't break the EULA) you could just try to exploit one of the Windows Vista/7 weaknesses. In fact you could try to exploit more than one, I'm sure they are. In plain English you bypass Windows Vista product activation 🙂
So you got a message like the one below (or similar):
Windows Activation - choose "..with reduced functionality"
I would recommend you to follow the steps already described here and/or here. You can even try the method presented here. Maybe it works in your case. The things are so complicated nowadays, we are so many people, we have so many systems, we deal with so many different situations, multiply all of these and you will got a million billion trillion zillion squillion different problems, isn't it?
Note that all these methods are just a temporary way of avoiding your Windows Vista/7 license activation. Never consider them a permanent solution.
If you are interested on Windows XP license activation you could read also an article I wrote about this.
[!] WARNING [!]
I would not recommend to anyone to try this procedure to gain the access to use an unlicensed copy of Windows. In fact, when dealing with licensed software (like Windows), I would strongly recommend you to contact your software provider to ask it if you are allowed to do something like that or not. I wrote this article only for myself for research/educational purposes.
Now, if you think that this article was interesting don't forget to rate it. It shows me that you care and thus I will continue write about these things.
Eugen Mihailescu
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Looks like Microsoft has abandoned XP. I have been using a number of programs on this system, but now I would have to spend a lot of money to try and obtain more programs. A confounded problem.
Ivan
Eugen,
Thank you for your help. Windows XP was the last decent OS for engineers that Microshaft put out. The micro is for performance.. Why does it run both 64 and 32 bit software so well, without glitches hiccups etc. And why does it have such increased performance when you add RAM, New SSD's, update the old dual core opterons to hex core, and add a ton of ram, all in an alder server. Win 10 ran like a turtle on it and we just took it off. WIN XP ran the same software but older versions much faster. Why is this, and now I know why they don't want to support it. They have to sell new OS, and this is their business model. I am trying to get the company to look at Open Source now that the engineering programs have better GUI, but mgt. is resistant, for lack of familiarity, but really what they do not understand is it takes years to master some programs well.
Thank you again for this. It and the XP activation you did, sorry this ended up in the VISTA one, but I sed them both, and it helped a lot. I wish I knew what you did, or had a clone in my project group.
Thanks again Bib