Getting around DRM

Windows XP Activation
So, you've decided you really need an XP machine, because there's just one game too many that you want to replay and can't get to run? You got some nice old hardware for it and a nice legit old copy of XP? But now this thing wants to be activated, because, of course. Sadly, even with your nice legit license key, this is apparently not possible anymore today, so here's some info on how to get it to work anyway:

(Just info dump from my notes file on it for now, needs nice writing up! If anyone tries this again, feel free to do that!)

Btw, this reminds me, I never posted the end of my getting the XP machine running story - I had to install the SP3 upgrade and .NET4 framework in order to be able to install the drivers for my graphics card (for which luckily there actually were official XP drivers available via some archive search on nvidia's webpage). That apparently broke my activation hack though and after some hardware troubles (broken soundcard making the system not boot anymore, empty mainboard battery we replaced and then adjusted the bios clock again, which was dumb, because then the trial period before activation was considered over), but this helped to recover from a loop of "you need to activate windows to log in"x"already activated": https://raywoodcockslatest.wordpress.com/2016/06/12/ways-to-activate-windows-xp/amp/

I am afraid I have to report that it does not work anymore after 30 days, I am in that same "need to activate" - "already activated" loop again.

Ok, that worked again now, so that is not too shitty. I only had to reboot, hit F8 to go into safe mode on boot and then do this: "From that point, the advice offered by WikiHow was, in effect, to go to Start > Run or WinKey-R. Either way, that gave me a Run box. There, I typed rundll32.exe syssetup,SetupOobeBnk and clicked OK. Nothing seemed to happen. I hoped it had done something. I went to Start > Turn Off Computer > Restart. This time, Windows XP started up normally, without an activation barrier."

other links:

http://mynixworld.info/2012/12/19/bypass-windows-xp-license-activation/

https://www.wikihow.com/Activate-Windows-XP-Without-a-Genuine-Product-Key

https://superuser.com/questions/1502796/how-do-i-activate-windowsxp-now-that-support-has-ended