One wag on the KezNews forum did the math and concluded that it would take 1.35 quintillion years - that’s 1,351,869,740,791,670,000 years to be exact - for the tool to work its way through all of the possible key combinations.Īlthough a few on the forum claimed that they’d found a valid activation key, many more who tried KeyGen gave up in frustration. If Vista is not activated within 30 days of its first-time use, it drops into a crippled state in which only the browser works, and then only for an hour at a time.Ĭomputer User claimed that KeyGen can check about 20,000 keys an hour, but warned others that it could take “hours, days” to come up with a working activation key.
Vista’s activation, which is part of the company’s overall anti-counterfeit program, validates the license’s product key - in Vista’s case, that’s a 25-character alphanumeric string - to make sure that the key isn’t used multiple times by pirates. Those parts of the procedure can only be done manually. Crackers, however, must periodically check to see if the key they entered earlier has changed, then attempt to activate using the changed key. According to the write-up by someone identified as Computer User, who created the “KeyGen” tool, the process uses a modified version of the software license manager script file to search for valid keys.
