Microsoft gives Pirated Vista the black screen of death

Wednesday, Sep. 12 2007 | Author: Griffith

Looks like Microsoft has decided to change it’s anti-piracy policy a little bit from their old “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else”. It appears that now, when Microsoft detects that you’re using an illegal version of Vista, or an abused license key, you will have 30 days to register a legal one, or to be reduced to a “Reduced Functionality” mode.

What exactly is that mode? Well, when you boot into Vista, you get a black screen, with the Internet Explorer icon. Oh, and you can only surf the internet for about an hour… talk about a nightmare!

If you want to see this reduced functionality mode in action, then check out this video.

Illegal Vista Copies to become crippled after 30 days
Microsoft Vista Beta 2
Microsoft to Release 20 Versions of Windows Vista
Windows Vista to Boot in 2 to 3 seconds
Windows Vista Warnings and Issues

Hope you like that post!

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8 Responses for "Microsoft gives Pirated Vista the black screen of death"

Eddy3oy

September 13th, 2007 at 04:02
1

Sure, you get internet explorer but by using the old file:///windows/system32/cmd.exe it’s possible to open up a command prompt and then get explorer running. For some reason you can only run 3 apps at once and as mentioned above, it runs for an hour then logs you off but it’s usefull if you find that the 30 days is up and you can’t afford to register until that cheque clears…
Eddy3oy

September 13th, 2007 at 04:05
2

sorry, the link should be file://C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe
Christopher

September 13th, 2007 at 08:14
3

open command prompt as adm. and type “slmgr-rearm”this allows you to reset the 30 period on vista to 30 more days this trick only works 3 times but hey thats 120 days
Eddy3oy

September 13th, 2007 at 08:51
4

I tried the slmgr-rearm trick as well as a couple of registry hacks but couldn’t get it to work (Vista Business) so had to resort to jumping through the hoops above to get Office working while we waited for our serials to turn up
Christopher

September 13th, 2007 at 09:18
5

dont forget to restart
Christopher

September 13th, 2007 at 09:22
6
Christopher

September 13th, 2007 at 09:22
7

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000778.html
Ralph

March 8th, 2009 at 06:21
8

What i did about the black the black screen is that i disable the slsvc.exe and now i don’t get the black background and the computer works good.