I know I’m always late with the Red vs. Blue movies, but this one is funny as hell.  I’m up to Chapter 6 and I gotta keep going.  I’m very tempted to buying the DVD set, it’s just that awesome.  See more at Rooster Teeth.

I found this very interesting article doing a Google search on “Vista Activation”. I had to put on this site to help keep this idea/article alive. I took excerpts and posted them here. You can find the full article here, http://windowssecrets.com/comp/070315/ I would suggest that everyone read this article; it’s a bit long, but it gives you a good insight to the slack these computer companies have. It does benefit us, though.  Overall; the process didn’t work for me, but it did give me some hope – at the time.  The good that came out of that is it forced me to switch to linux and I’m now, proudly, running Fefora 8.

Postponing Procedure

The procedure below can be performed any time before the activation runs out. It’s a 50/50 whether it’ll work after 3 times.  Either way 3 times equals 90 days of running Vista without activation.

1. While running a copy of Windows Vista that hasn’t yet been activated, click the Start button, type regedit into the Search box, then press Enter to launch the Registry Editor.
2. Explore down to the following Registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ SL
3. Right-click the Registry key named SkipRearm and click Edit. The default is a Dword (a double word or 4 bytes) with a hex value of 00000000. Change this value to any positive integer, such as 00000001, save the change, and close the Registry Editor.
4. Start a command prompt with administrative rights. The fastest way to do this is to click the Start button, enter cmd in the Search box, then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. If you’re asked for a network username and password, provide the ones that log you into your domain. You may be asked to approve a User Account Control prompt and to provide an administrator password.
5. Type one of the following two commands and press Enter:
   
   slmgr -rearm
   or
   rundll32 slc.dll,SLReArmWindows

   Either command uses Vista’s built-in Software Licensing Manager (SLMGR) to push the activation deadline out to 30 days after the command is run. Changing SkipRearm from 0 to 1 allows SLMGR to do this an indefinite number of times. Running either command initializes the value of SkipRearm back to 0.

6. Reboot the PC to make the postponement take effect. (After you log in, if you like, you can open a command prompt and run the command slmgr -xpr to see Vista’s new expiration date and time. I explained the slmgr command and its parameters in my Feb. 15 article.)
7. To extend the activation deadline of Vista indefinitely, repeat steps 1 through 6 as necessary.

I found this video from a pandora ad while listening to some music. Visit the site for more funny videos or browse YouTube. It’s basically Microsoft‘s attempt at some funny advertising for people buying servers for their home. It’s a Steven Colbert parity and I think they did a good job.

Official Stay-at-Home Server web site.