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.
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…
sorry, the link should be file://C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe
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
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
dont forget to restart
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000778.html
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.