Windows Vista comes with the same annoying “product activation” that Windows XP does… but with one crucial difference. Vista has the hidden ability to reset the activation countdown timer up to four times. So instead of the 30 days of activation-free use that Windows XP offers, you can get as much as 120 days with Windows Vista. This was especially welcome news to me, as I needed to add an extra gig of RAM to my system to make Vista run a bit more smoothly. I’d had Vista installed for 28 days now, and so had only 2 days left before activation was required. Because local RAM prices were completely insane, I had to order the memory online. And since I would have had to activate Vista in 2 days, I would have had to pay insane amounts of money for overnight shipping. But with this trick, I just reset the countdown timer and had an extra 30 days to worry about it.
To reset the activation counter in Windows Vista:
1. Click on the Start button and and type “Cmd” (without quotes) in Start Search box. DO NOT press enter yet!
2. Press on Ctrl+Shift+Enter to open Command Prompt (this is crucial, as it allows the following commands to run as the local Administrator).
3. At the command prompt, type slmgr -rearm and then press the ENTER key.
4. Type EXIT and press the ENTER key to exit the command prompt, then reboot your computer.
When you come back from the reboot, you should now have 30 full days to use Vista again before you have to activate. You can run the rearm command up to 4 times, giving you a total of 120 days of Vista use before you are required to activate the OS. It’s important to understand that this command will reset the counter back to 30 days only; if you currently have 15 days left and run this command, you’ll have 30 days left before activation\rearming is required – not 45 days.