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Summary

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In Windows Vista, I have experienced an occasion where a completely valid, legal and paid-for copy of Windows Vista suddenly thought it's activation period had expired and that it was no longer a genuine installation of Windows.

In this scenario, I knew it was a paid-for copy of Windows and it had been working perfectly for what felt like a number of months. In hindsight, it *may* have been 30 days, but i'm 85% certain it was much longer than that. Perhaps a Windows update screwed things up, maybe?

Anyway, this page documents the procedure I used to fix it. Note that this procedure did not involve reinstalling Windows Vista! :-)

The Procedure

To decide whether you suffer from this problem or not, boot up your Vista machine and login. If you see this dialog box and nothing else each time you login, then this procedure is potentially for you.

Windows Activation - Reinstall Windows dialog box.

If you were actually going to reinstall Windows, you would, of course, end up with the same version of Windows, on the same hardware, using the same license key/product code, and then have to install all of your programs again and try to get your data back from somewhere, because remember - reinstalling windows makes it really easy to erase your entire hard drive!!

So... once you know that you are suffering from this problem follow these steps:

Get back into Windows

Before you can do anything, you need to get back into Windows. To do this, click the "How do I reinstall Windows?" link in the dialog box, as shown above.

This brings you to a help page. Click the "Home" icon at the top of the window, as shown below.

Scroll down and click on the "Microsoft Customer Support" link just underneath the main help categories.

Providing you have Internet access, this opens Internet Explorer at the Microsoft Support Centre. Into the address bar, type C:\, as shown below, and hit ENTER.

Navigate to the "Windows" folder, as shown below.

Scroll down until you see "explorer" (or simply click on the list of files and start typing "explorer" - it should scroll automatically to the right place then) and double-click on it.

You should now have a start bar!

Pretty much as soon as the start bar appears, the following dialog will also appear. Simply close it, because as long as your version of Windows is legal and paid-for, you know this message is not true.

Extend the Activation Deadline

Now you have a working start bar, and Windows Explorer window, you can either choose to backup your files (upload them to the web somewhere, copy them to your USB pen, copy them over the network etc...) or assume your data is safe and if you lose it, you don't care!

In order to continue, you need to boot into Windows normally, but in order to do this, you need to temporarily extend the activation deadline so Windows will log you in normally.

In order to extend the period in which you have to activate Windows Vista, you need to follow a procedure originally documented on Windows Secrets. For the sake of consistency, i shall quote their web site below:

Step 1. While running a copy of Windows Vista that hasn't yet been activated, click the Start button, type regedit into the Search box, then press Enter to launch the Registry Editor.

Step 2. Explore down to the following Registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ SL

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.

Step 4. Start a command prompt with administrative rights. The fastest way to do this is to click the Start button, enter cmd in the Search box, then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. If you're asked for a network username and password, provide the ones that log you into your domain. You may be asked to approve a User Account Control prompt and to provide an administrator password.

Step 5. Type one of the following two commands and press Enter:

slmgr -rearm

or

rundll32 slc.dll,SLReArmWindows

Either command uses Vista's built-in Software Licensing Manager (SLMGR) to push the activation deadline out to 30 days after the command is run. Changing SkipRearm from 0 to 1 allows SLMGR to do this an indefinite number of times. Running either command initializes the value of SkipRearm back to 0.

Step 6. Reboot the PC to make the postponement take effect. (After you log in, if you like, you can open a command prompt and run the command slmgr -xpr to see Vista's new expiration date and time. I explained the slmgr command and its parameters in my Feb. 15 article.)

It is very important to note, at this stage, that according to the Windows Secrets article, the above procedure will not work forever. It will delay activation where necessary, but cannot be used to delay it indefinitely. Eventually Windows will want activation regardless of how many times you've run the above steps.

Reinstall Vista Licenses

Now your PC has rebooted, you should be able to simply log into Windows! It will probably moan that your copy of Windows is not genuine and will also moan that you have not yet activated your installation of Windows, but we are about to fix those problems.

At this point, it is probably worth attempting to run the activation. If it works, great! It will, however, probably fail.

Click "Start", right-click "Computer" and select "Properties".

Scroll to the bottom, and enter your product key again. This can be found either on your genuine Windows CD or DVD, or on a holographic sticker on your PC or laptop. This is the key that you basically pay for when you buy Windows, and is essential is making your installation genuine!

Once this is done, and after you have rebooted (if Windows requests that you do so), click the link above to active your copy of Windows.

If activation fails, keep reading...

According to a post on Microsoft's Forum, Windows will not think it's genuine because it's internal Licenses are corrupted/lost/stuck/whatever. These can be reinstalled quite easily. Again, i will quote the forum post below.

(If you DO have access to the start button)

1) Click the Start button

2) Type cmd in the Start Search field

3) At the top the Start window, you will see cmd.exe

4) Right Click cmd.exe and select Run as Administrator

5) Type: cscript %windir%\System32\slmgr.vbs /ilc %windir%\System32\licensing\ppdlic\Security-Licensing-SLC-ppdlic.xrm-ms

6) Hit the Enter key

7) Reboot 2 times

(If you DO NOT have access to the start button)

1) Click the option Access computer with reduced functionality

2) A Browser will open, type: %windir%\system32 into the address field

3) Find the file cmd.exe

4) Right Click on the cmd.exe and select Run as Administrator

5) Type: cscript %windir%\System32\slmgr.vbs /ilc %windir%\System32\licensing\ppdlic\Security-Licensing-SLC-ppdlic.xrm-ms

6) Hit the Enter key

7) Reboot 2 times

Validate your copy of Windows and Activate!

Once you have rebooted twice, Windows may well still show up as not genuine. This can be resolved by visiting the Genuine Microsoft Software site and clicking the "Validate Windows" button.

Once you follow the procedure to validate Windows, it should come back and say it's genuine. At least, it did when I tried it.

This next part, i can't quite remember. One of two things happened.

Either, Windows activated itself after it decided it was genuine OR I activated Windows myself after it had realised it was genuine.

Whichever way it happened, Windows was activated successfully and has been working ever since!

Disclaimer

If the information on this page is either out-of-date, incorrect, or if you'd just like more information then please Contact Me.