Hi !

May someone help me ?

I want to know that, how the evaluation version of a software (particularly under windows32 ... 98 ... XP) work ?

I once had a "beta released of C# IDE" and it had around 3 month's (probably ...) validitiy after which it stopped working.

Even re-partitioning, re-intaslling did not help me.

Then it has made some very ugly tricks, or you didn't repartition it right. Maybe some CMOS or initial unused HDD sectors or something could be used, but that is not very reliable. Another possibility is to require internet connection for "first" run of software.

in my job i was doing this recently, but had to do it working under unprivileged user mode, so all i could do was to store in registry and files.

If you force user to have some privileges you can use native APIs to hide your registry keys and files, and you can access HW directly (bad).

It looks like as trojan. Do not use this approach!!!

Kermil: you should see what other real protectors do... just mind Starforce. Or even others, if they don't use drivers, they still rely on some priviliged features, or /dev/mem-kind of thing etc...

With fancy debuggers and such evaluation versions and protections of that kind are becoming more and more obselete.

Web-based software is the newest/best way to secure software. Only problem is you have to write it using ajax/javascript and jsp|php|cgi. But since standards on browsers are enforced so poorly creating web based apps becomes ...[early rant termination]

m : the software you had probably created a unique ID from your hardware serial numbers and sent that to a main server. Then the software probably had an extra junkware program that ran in the background LIKE *updater (theres enough of them to choose from, java, acrobat, windows ...). The program would poll the main server and see if your unique ID still had days left in the trial and if not, the program would break itself.

If some protections use privileged functions then is it right approach to create evalution version of software? No! Remember the situation with protection from Sony. Is it good protection?

Thanks a lot to you all !

I was not connected (actually I never am) to the internet while i installed the software.
I repartitioned my hard-disk using (cfdisk in Linux). I tried changing my system time (while in windows though).
But, urrgh ... no result.

what exactly does "repartitioned" mean? Did you delete all files and registry keys?

Hey vid, i ran cfdisk (maybe you know how it works). Deleted all partitions that were there on my hard-disk (viz. win98, winXP, Linux and Swap partitions). Then the cfdisk was showing me around 40GB of free space. So, i created the same set of partitions (as they were before) with roughly the same sizes.

I am not sure what a partitioning tool does (exactly !).