Jeff’s Blog

We know how it is: you've paid $300 for your brand new copy of Windows 7, but what a hassle to enter in that activation code! Well, you don't have to worry about it now for a good four months after install: Microsoft has given its sort-of blessing to a simple hack to keep that non-activated copy of Windows 7 humming for a full 120 days before full-on nag mode sets in. All you have to do is enter "slmgr -rearm" into the command prompt at the end of every 30 day period, and your copy of Windows gets a whole new lease on life -- an action that can be repeated three times. The same command is available to Vista users, and we have to say that Microsoft has come a very long way since its unforgiving WGA kill switch days.

[Via Telegraph]

Filed under: Software

Windows 7 runs free without activation for 120 days with simple command originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Tried to update my Dell Axim X30 to the latest pocket PC available for it.  The installed would not work in vista, saying there was a problem with the USB driver. Went to a XP machine and it worked just fine.  My HP laserjet 1012 also did not have a driver available.  I used the XP driver but that didn’t work, it just crashed the print spooler.  I had to change a few things and magically it started to work.  My advice to XP users wait 6 to 12 months or at least make sure their is driver support for all your hardware, and also make sure your software will run without having to upgrade all of it.

In vista if you run a program as a user, it will also change your default path to that users. So if you click desktop and save a file it is on that admin users desktop not the user logged in. This is not very intuitive, it should be like in unix with su. su doesn’t change your path you just become that user su – changes your path.

Vista has turned on by default TCP auto tunning that will try and set the most efficient receive window size automatically. The problem is though if all your networking equipment isn’t up to date it will cause Vista to slow to a crawl. To disable auto tuning type the following in a command window as administrator.

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

That should return an OK

To check that it is disabled run the following.

netsh interface tcp show global

So far that I have run into the following doesn’t work correctly in vista

• Ghost 7.5
• Nero 6