When you first install Windows Vista, you can run it for 30 days without entering a product key. This is the evaluation period, but what happens if your thirty days runs out before you buy an activation key; if you're not sure you want to buy one; or if you were only trying out Vista and don't plan to buy it, but have some files you need to get off of that computer?Well, as Dwight Silverman found out the hard way, on day 31 Windows boots up and gives you a warning message that you're running a version of Vista that's not "genuine." Then Internet Explorer opens up and asks if you'd like to purchase an activation key. Silverman was able to figure out how to open a few programs and move a few files around through the Internet Explorer interface, which was necessary because he wanted to clean up the PC before returning the evaluation computer he'd been using.
But it turns out there's an officially supported way to turn that 30 day evaluation period into 120 days.
