Is Windows Server Rearm Safe? (Learn How to Extend Your Trial Without Risk)

Hey everyone, I want to share a little trick I recently used on my Windows Server. So, I had this evaluation version of Windows Server running, you know, the one that gives you a 180-day trial. Well, those 180 days went by pretty fast, and I wasn’t quite ready to buy a license yet.

I did a little digging, and I found out that you can actually extend this trial period. It’s called “rearming” the server. Basically, it’s like resetting the clock on your trial.

Here’s what I did:

• First, I opened up the Command Prompt. Just hit the Windows key, type “cmd”, and hit Enter. Make sure to run it as an administrator, though. You can do this by right-clicking on Command Prompt and selecting “Run as administrator”.
• Then, I typed in this command: slmgr -rearm and hit Enter.
• After that, I got a message saying the command completed successfully and that I needed to restart the server. So, I restarted it.

Boom! That’s it. When the server came back up, the trial period was reset. I had another 180 days to use it. I found out that you can actually do this up to six times. If you do the math, that’s like three years of free usage! Not bad, right?

Now, I know some people might say this is a gray area, but hey, it’s a built-in feature. And it’s really useful if you’re just testing things out or need a little extra time before committing to a license. It says that bypassing or circumventing the activation is not allowed, and I haven’t done that, so don’t worry about it. Otherwise, after 30 days, I either enter a real key or remove it by reformatting, and I will comply with Exporting * my server shut down someday, I will know that the license has expired.

So, there you have it. A simple way to extend your Windows Server trial period. Hope this helps someone out there!