Control Your Licensing with Slmgr

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.

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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.

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 [:]

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.