Vista Activation

Well after my AMD 64X2 CPU, ATI Graphics, NVidia chipset issues with Vista I was glad I hadn't entered the License key into setup when installing Vista. If you didn't already know you don't actually have to put the license key in at install, this puts Vista into a 30 day trial mode which is useful to do in case you get unexpected issues such as I did, this avoids having to go through the issues surrounding moving your Vista installation over to a new machine in case of issues.
Originally I had bought a few new parts to build the Vista PC I was going to install the Ultimate 64 bit edition on, so I ordered the OEM copy of Vista. This has its advantages, it is cheaper; and its disadvantages, the installation is then tied to the Motherboard.

So what if you have done exactly as I did and you wanted to move the installation over to a new machine and sell the old components on ebay, but didn't quite have the cash and needed another month in the trial mode to get the cash together? Well, there is an answer. During testing last year the team I was in came across the commandline version of the Software Licensing Manager in Vista, this allows you to Manage the product activation, change the License Key you are using, and even to re-arm the trial period (for 4 times only).

To access this commandline utility (if it is not as in my case on the start menu), you need to Click on the start Orb - Accessories, then right click on Command Prompt and select Run as Administrator:-

Select this option, and either accept the UAC prompt (if running as an administrator level account), or enter the credentials of an administrator account.

In the command prompt enter slmgr /? this will bring up a wscript switch option box up

Here you can see all the switches you can use with the software Licensing Manager, the one we are interested in is rearm. So click on OK, then in the command propmpt enter slmgr -rearm

then click enter. A prompt will appear saying that the command completed successfully, click OK and restart your system. This will rearm the trial period for you to continue working for a further 30 until you can buy the new parts you need.

64 Bit Woes...........

Well after a hiatus of a few months where I have been a bit busy with work unrelated to Vista of anything similar I have finally bitten the bullet and bought a shiny copy of Vista Ultimate 64Bit Version, yes the 64 Bit Version! I had heard all the issues with Drivers with the 64 Bit version but after checking up on the motherboard I was going to buy and the graphics card I had I was confident all would be fine.
How wrong I was, the system I had been using on 32 Bit vista was fine, but the processor wasn’t great, memory upgradability wasn’t great, and I hadn’t had my AGP based graphics card for long. So I picked a motherboard that supported a lot of RAM and AGP, and it turned out to be an AMD based board, but luckily I could get an Athlon 64x2 (AM2) processor to go with the motherboard so all should have been fine. Vista installed, no problems reported with the hardware apart from the AGP based card, I had the 64 Bit Vista drivers downloaded already, everything installed nicely, rebooted as prompted, and then the drivers failed. The AGP card was back in PCI mode. So after trying to install other versions of the drivers and ripping them out completely a lot of research uncovered that I could disable one of the cores in the dual core processor and everything would work perfectly, I did this using MSCONFIG, then let windows install the Microsoft version of the drivers. After a reboot everything was fine, and now that it is I will be imaging the machine, and quickly. Interestingly enough the small amount of software I have put on there works perfectly, and fast (although I only have a proxy server and SSH server installed so far). Next comes all the stuff I had the 32 Bit version set up to do such as serving content to my XBOX 360 via the media center, but there will be more about that in my non-work blog which is quite sparse at the moment.