| Executive Summary:
Use Slmgr to change a Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 product key or activate a system, extend your product-activation grace period, and determine whether your computer's license is a volume, retail, or OEM license. |
The annoyance that is Windows Product Activation used
to plague only small businesses and home PC users, but
now that Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 use
it, we all have to grapple with it. Your primary client-side
tool for managing a system’s software licensing is called
Slmgr (slmgr.vbs). Need to change a product key or activate
a system from the command line? Want to extend Server 2008’s
60-day grace period to 240 days? Not sure whether your computer’s
license is a volume, retail, or OEM license? If so, you need Slmgr.
Putting It to Work
If you have systems without a GUI or systems that need to activate
via a batch file, Slmgr’s -ato option is useful. To activate a system,
simply open an elevated command prompt and type
slmgr -ato
If you’re working on a system that’s using either a retail copy or
a volume license copy of Windows that’s been activated with the
Multiple Activation Key (MAK), Slmgr attempts to contact Microsoft’s
activation web servers. However, if the system is running a
copy of Windows built from the volume license media and has been
activated with the Volume License Key (VLK), Slmgr knows that it
should instead try to contact your organization’s Key Management
Server (KMS). When Slmgr requires Microsoft’s servers, it already
knows those Internet addresses. But if Slmgr needs to find your KMS
server, it needs to ask its local DNS server to resolve an SRV record
that reveals your local KMS server’s host name:
_vlmcs._tcp.<your organization’s DNS zone name>
For example, bigfirm.com’s SRV records identifying its KMS
server would be _vlmcs._tcp.bigfirm.com. Sometimes, though,
technical configuration problems or institutional constraints keep
that SRV record out of your organization’s DNS zone, and Slmgr
can’t activate your copy of Windows. But if you know your local KMS
server’s host name or IP address, you can tell your Vista or Server
2008 system to activate via that KMS server by using the command
slmgr -skms <server name or IP address>[:<port>]
So, if your KMS server is named kms1.bigfirm.com, you’d type
slmgr -skms kms1.bigfirm.com
The optional colon and port number point to the fact that activation
traffic runs over port 1688, by default; if you’ve reconfigured your
KMS server to use another port (e.g., port 2010), you’d extend the
Slmgr -skms command by suffixing a colon and that port number
to the KMS server’s name. For example,
slmgr -skms kms1.bigfirm.com:2010
Before you can activate a copy of Windows, you need to give it a
product key. The easiest method is to make liberal use of the greatly
improved setup scripts in Vista and Server 2008. But if you need to
install or change a product key from the command line, the -ipk
(“install product key”) option can help. For example,
slmgr -ipk YGR45-THIS9-WONT5-0WORK-D7667
would enter the YGR45-THIS9-WONT5-0WORK-D7667 product key.
Have you ever needed to know whether a system license is an
OEM, retail, or volume license? The Slmgr -dli command shows
your Windows version (e.g., Vista Ultimate, Server Enterprise), the
final five characters in your product key, the licensing state, whether
you’ve activated, and—if not yet activated—how many minutes you
have left. The Slmgr -dlv command also reveals that information,
along with a few more activation details and several URLs to places
on Microsoft’s site that appear not to work anymore.
Finally, suppose you don’t yet want to activate your copy of Windows
for some reason. Vista gives you a 30-day grace period, and
Server 2008 gives you 60 days, but both OSs also let you reset those
grace periods four times, making Vista’s actual grace period about
120 days and Server 2008’s about 240 days. To reset it, just open an
elevated command prompt and type
slmgr -rearm
Take Control
If you’re running Slmgr for the first time to do anything but activate
a system, you might notice that it’s slow. I suspect that the extremely
complex mathematics underlying product-key and license verification
add up to one of the most important weapons in Microsoft’s
arsenal in its war on piracy—although no one at Microsoft has ever
confirmed this suspicion. Regardless, dealing with activation is no
fun, but at least Slmgr lets you take greater control of it.