Your Windows License will expire in 0 hours... :-O | The Coffeehouse

OrigamiCar

Hey all,

Firstly - some background, I am not a Vista hater. Infact, I have used Vista since the RTM hit MSDN over a year ago and have had zero problems with it....

...until just now.
There I was, merrily playing Battlefield 2 (I rarely play games but had an hour to spare or so) when all of a sudden, BF2 minimized and I got a system popup from Vista saying something along the lines of:

"Your Windows license will expire in 0 hours.
Make sure you backup your files ... blah blah"

This scared me somewhat as I have had Vista ultimate installed on this PC for over 12 months and it has definately been activated. First thing I do is check to make sure that it is still activated and it is, so I guess I'm okay.

My question is, where did that message come from and why??! I'm pretty much of the opinion that it's a false positive, but imagine if someone who is just a user were to get something similar - they'd be panicing. I haven't changed any hardware recently and as I said, Windows is definately activated.

Yowza.

RoyalSchrubber
One. How many time travellers does it take to change a lightbulb?

Are you sure you got legit license and nobody has seen your license key. Are you sure you use same key on only one machine? Maybe you bought your license at dodgy local store? Maybe it's also worth doing quick virus scan - http://www.bitdefender.com/scan8/ie.html just in case..

OrigamiCar

In reply to RoyalSchrubber

#Jul 23rd, 2008 @ 7:42 PM

Yep - definately have a valid license key/progID for this. I'm using my MSDN professional key which only I have access to.

I've done a little more digging and it appears that this message occurs because a prerelease of SP1 may be installed:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/954753

What's wierd is that I am 99.9% positive that I installed the RTM version of SP1 from the MSDN download site as I usually don't install betas of service packs. However, it is I suppose possible that I tried out the pre RTM version as this isn't my main PC, rather a slightly older one I use for debugging/testing and playing odd games on.

I'm uninstalling SP1 now and going to reinstall it. HOPEFULLY I won't have to flatten this machine and start again, although the knowledgebase article seems to suggest that you need to uninstall SP1 BEFORE you get the zero hours message. Anyway, here's hoping....

Niner

In reply to OrigamiCar

#Jul 23rd, 2008 @ 8:07 PM

Yes if you had tried time-bombed SP1 , that will cause that problem. You might be in beta program of SP1 from Connect .
If you had installed RTM of SP1 from Connect that was time bombed.
Uninstall that SP1 and install SP1 from Windows Update or MS downloads.
One of my friends also had the same problem which solved by this method.

He also had trouble with installing Windows Search 4.0 earlier with time bombed SP1 and was also resolved by this.