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The amount of days given to try are normally around 30 days but it could be shorter or longer depending on the author of the software. In the earlier days, you can easily run the expired software by simply backdating the date on your Windows operating system but some software has got smarter to detect this and instantly ends the trial period.
Normally there are two types of restrictions for shareware. The first one is the demo version with limited or crippled functionality that doesn’t have an expiry date and another type is the fully functional trial version that expires after a certain period of time. The amount of days given to try are normally around 30 days but it could be shorter or longer depending on the author of the software. In the earlier days, you can easily run the expired software by simply backdating the date on your Windows operating system but some software has got smarter to detect this and instantly ends the trial period.
You might think to yourself, how does the shareware knows how many days left in the trial period? Most of the time these commercial and freeware protectors drop some information somewhere deep inside your computer after installation so they know when it was installed and then comparing with the official current time pulled from the Internet. It is possible to find the location that records that information by using file or registry monitoring software including third party uninstaller software such as Revo Uninstaller but it can be tedious and frustrating work.
Here’s a few simpler ways on how you can extend trial periods of software using various different methods.
1. NirSoft RunAsDateAs the name might suggest, RunAsDate performs a trick on the trial software that has expired by injecting the time and date you specify into its process. This has a similar effect to manually setting your system clock to a different time and date, but in this instance your real clock remains unchanged. RunAsDate can also have multiple instances of its program running at once, and each one can have a separate date, all different to the real one.
As a simple example, if you’re using the popular archiver WinZip and its 30 day trial period has expired, it won’t let you use the program anymore, and you either have to purchase a license or uninstall it. Using RunAsDate, you can set the date back to be within the trial period making WinZip usable again. The image below is WinZip after the 30 day trial has passed, note the “Use Evaluation Version” is now grayed out.
If you now load up RunAsDate, all you have to do is browse for the application to use the program on, in this case “C:Program FilesWinZipWINZIP32.EXE”, then choose a date and time from the pop-out calender to before the trial period expired. Now simply press the Run button.
RunAsDate has a few other options such as allow arguments to be applied to the executable, and also a useful option to create a desktop shortcut which will automatically launch the application with the configuration options you’ve supplied in the window. The Immediate Mode check box can be used to inject the date/time earlier in the process, but is known to cause crashes on some programs, especially those using .NET.
If you run WinZip after entering the right date and time numbers and press Run or launch it via a shortcut, you’ll notice it no longer says expired and the Evaluation button is clickable again. Although time and date altering isn’t going to work on all trial software that has an expiry, it is a very quick and easy thing to try out first before turning to more advanced methods.
Download NirSoft RunAsDate
2. Trial-Reset 4.0
This is the final version released in 2010 by “The Boss”, and is able to scan and remove 45 types of commercial and freeware protections including some software that uses custom protectors such as Reflexive, Namo, ABBYY, WinRAR, WinZip and etc. In fact if you know the registry location of where the trial information are recorded for a shareware program, you can create your own text file and save it in the Lists folder.
Do note that Trial-Reset does not modify the shareware in anyway. It simply cleans the registry keys generated by the protectors which are normally not removed even after uninstalling the software. This is how a lot of shareware knows you have no trial period left, even if you uninstall and re-install the program again. Trial-Reset is very easy to use. To start scanning, simply click on the All located at the bottom left. The scanning will take a while since some of the methods require scanning the hard drive. The right pane will show all the detected keys that are used by any shareware titles.
You can backup, view or delete the keys, add to protect or auto cleaning list from the right click context menu. If you have a lot of shareware installed, there will be quite a number of results and you will need to do a trial and error to find the key that is associated with the software that you want to reset the trial period.
Download Trial-Reset 4.0 including Source Code
12Next › View All You might also like:
Download Norton Security 2015 with Free 90 Days Trial Subscription6 Ways to Kill and Remove Fake Antivirus Rogue Software10 Software to Recover Product Key Licenses from ComputerUninstalling Any Nero Burning Software3 Tools to Check and Update your Vulnerable or Insecure Software 34 Comments - Write a Comment
which one can be use to extend trial period of treeage?
Replywhich one works for trial anti-virus program like avg/kaspersky/bitdefender?
ReplyA slim possibility #4 might do something but software that connects to the internet as much as antivirus does will likely store data about your trial online, which you can’t change because it’s held elsewhere.
ReplyWhere are other three ways?
ReplyTry page 2…
ReplyThere is zero reason to ever download, trial, or worse pay for winzip. 7-zip does more, is equally (more?) usable, and is free and open source, with regular releases for Windows.
ReplyJust because you prefer one bit of software over another, doesn’t mean you should be instructing others not to use it. Winzip has a different feature set to 7-Zip and they are certainly not equal. If others want to pay for or use Winzip, they are perfectly entitled to do so.
You should be happy there’s so much choice out there and people have options to choose what’s best for them.
ReplyFor me it’s just a matter of which looks nicer, i don’t need any of the extra things 7-zip does.
Replythank you sir raymond.
ReplyThank a billion! It perfectly works for most of my trial software.
God bless Devs from RunAsDate and also Mr. Raymon for giving us info about this amazing software.
ReplyGod bless Devs from RunAsDate and also Mr. Raymon for giving us info about this amazing software.
The first option worked for me. Thank you so much :)
ReplyPlease does this work on AutoCAD 2012. I just have 15days remaining.
ReplyAny body know how to reset trail date key
I look at the ResEdit only show date I try to download again yesterday
I want to know where is date it compair so I can change that date
Have to be 30 day Less than current date
I greatly appreciated if some can tell me where in registry I can change
ReplyI look at the ResEdit only show date I try to download again yesterday
I want to know where is date it compair so I can change that date
Have to be 30 day Less than current date
I greatly appreciated if some can tell me where in registry I can change
LIte Matt I can’t find the password – have downloaded the zip file but EVERYTHING needs a password? Any help would be great thank you
ReplyThe password is clearly stated on the download page…
Replycan someone tell me if this works for holdemresources? it does not work for me
ReplyFound a better way to extend trial:
Close Quickbooks
Delete all the files in this folder: C:ProgramDataIntuitEntitlement Clientv8
Then enter Quickbooks.
ReplyClose Quickbooks
Delete all the files in this folder: C:ProgramDataIntuitEntitlement Clientv8
Then enter Quickbooks.
Interesting that for example Sketchup Pro trial doesn’t need to be reset. Just switch off internet and change date to future like year 2050 and then install Sketchup. Do not run yet. Change date back to today and then delete %appdata%Sketchup and %localappdata%Sketchup and %programdata%sketchup. Then run it and it will have trial that doesn’t expire until year 2050.
ReplyAny suggestions for Toon Boom Harmony
ReplyI suggest to run any exe described here with sandboxie to isolate the damage and later delete the files from sandboxie. You also might like to use Oracle VM and mess as much as you like.
ReplyRunAsDate works perfect for any version of LabVIEW.
Thank you very much! It helped a lot.
ReplyDoes anyone know if RunAsDate works with QuickBooks. I’m in month 3 of a 6-month trial that came with a textbook for a class I’m taking. I still have time, but it would be so nice to be able to hang on to the software when the class is over.
ReplyVIRUS FOUND:
Trojan:Win32/Tulim.C!plock Alert Level: Severe
Trojan:Win32/Tulim.C!plock Alert Level: Severe
Category: Trojan
Description: This program is dangerous and executes commands from an attacker.
Recommended action: Remove this software immediately.
Items:
file:C:UsersUSERDownloadsTrial-Reset40FinalTrial-Reset40FinalPluginsReflexive.dll
Replyfile:C:UsersUSERDownloadsTrial-Reset40FinalTrial-Reset40FinalPluginsReflexive.dll
That is obviously a false positive and the file isn’t malicious, it happens a lot I’m afraid.
Like I say to everyone, if you are not comfortable, don’t use the program.
ReplyDoes any of this work for IDM? if so, which one works the best
ReplyWe’re not sure as we don’t use IDM, your only real option is to try things out and see…
ReplyI’d suggest trying Free Download Manager instead of trying to extend IDM. I used IDM initially but FDM is just as good if not better and, as the name suggests, free.
ReplyRather than extending it, why don’t you unlock it manually right away? There are lots of tricks available online!
ReplyAfter extracting and trying to run the application on windows for trial rest 4.0, it comes with an error.
ReplyHi – thank you so much for this blog. It has helped me a great deal!!
ReplyIt absolutely does work !
ReplyThanks for this much-awaited post. It is a boon for those who can not afford very high price of the software!
Replythe Trial-reste40final.zip needs a password to open. What is it?
ReplyThe password is listed on the page you downloaded the Trial-reste40final.zip from.
Glad you found it…
ReplyLeave a Reply
3. Time Stopper
Time Stopper is a program that behaves in a similar way to RunAsDate and fools the expired application into thinking it’s still within the trial period. This tool does differ slightly though because you don’t have the option to directly run the expired program from Time Stopper, but instead it is designed specifically to run from a desktop shortcut with the new time and date injected when you run the program from the shortcut.
Simply run Time Stopper and locate the trial software executable with the Browse button. Choose the new time and date from the pop-out calender, and then give the shortcut icon a name and finish by clicking the create button. Like Nirsoft RunAsDate, this tool will work on some shareware programs and not others but is easy enough to try.
Download Time Stopper
4. Using a Software Installation Monitor
This method may not seem that obvious at first, but actually can work quite well in many circumstances. The theory is simple in that you use a standard piece of installation monitor software which watches the files and registry entries that a program creates when it installs, and then can completely uninstall the software including everything that doesn’t get removed by the standard uninstaller. This often has the effect of also removing registry entries shareware might leave behind to watch its trial expiry status.
As an example, this can be achieved for the Internet Download Manager shareware program when its 30 day trial expires. We happen to know that the trial status of IDM is stored in the registry key “HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareClassesCLSID{07999AC3-058B-40BF-984F-69EB1E554CA7}”, but IDM doesn’t remove this key when you uninstall through its own uninstaller and the time/date trick doesn’t work. Therefore once the trial period expires, the information remains on your computer and it will stay expired even if you re-install the program again in future.
To demonstrate, we installed Comodo Programs Manager which is one of the better installation monitor’s around, and let it automatically monitor the install of IDM. Then once the trial period for IDM has expired, we simply select it for a “Complete Uninstall” in Comodo Programs Manager. After the standard uninstaller has finished, Programs Manager will show the extra files and registry entries that have been left behind. Expand the Registry tree and looking at the keys, we can see the IDM key which controls the trial period status is listed for removal. Continue the removal and if you re-install Internet Download Manager, its trial status will be reset to 30 days.
This method is obviously not foolproof but if you can install the trial software for the first time after installing the installation monitor, and the trial information is kept in the registry or a data file, one of these programs has a chance of picking it up and removing it which will reset the trial period.
5. Registry Trash Keys Finder
This might be a better solution these days because it is up-to-date. Unlike the Trial-Reset program which was last updated more than 2 years ago, it may not work on shareware that uses a newer version protector. Although Registry Trash Keys Finder is free, there are some limitations where some of the protection keys are not shown. The full version of Registry Trash Keys Finder is only available after donating to the author of this tool and it removes the limit.
As you can see at the screenshot above, there are 3 registry keys that shows {FREEWARE-VERSION-CAN’T-SHOW-THIS-KEY} for the Armadillo protector which cannot be seen nor deleted. We wanted to test the full version so badly that we donated to get it. From the “what’s new” area, we read that they’ve recently added a search routine for the latest Alawar.com games keys so we decided to put Alawar games to the test.
We downloaded a game from Alawar called Sticky Linky and played the whole free 60 minutes. Once the 60 minutes free play time is up, it shows 0 minutes game time left and we can no longer play the game until we purchase the game.
We ran Registry Trash Keys Finder full version and Alawar came up in the search results.
The Alawar key is deleted and running Sticky Linky now gives us another 60 minutes of free game time!
The Registry Trash Keys Finder full version has successfully extended the trial period of a game and it should also work for other software too. Other than just resetting the trial period, it also acts as a registry cleaner/optimizer where it detects obsolete registry keys of uninstall/app paths/SharedDLLs/Installer/MUICache/Help, unused file extensions, empty CLSID and TypeLib key, invalid name of CLSID and many more.
Download Registry Trash Keys Finder
‹ Previous12 View All You might also like:
Download Norton Security 2015 with Free 90 Days Trial Subscription6 Ways to Kill and Remove Fake Antivirus Rogue Software10 Software to Recover Product Key Licenses from ComputerUninstalling Any Nero Burning Software3 Tools to Check and Update your Vulnerable or Insecure Software 34 Comments - Write a Comment
which one can be use to extend trial period of treeage?
Replywhich one works for trial anti-virus program like avg/kaspersky/bitdefender?
ReplyA slim possibility #4 might do something but software that connects to the internet as much as antivirus does will likely store data about your trial online, which you can’t change because it’s held elsewhere.
ReplyWhere are other three ways?
ReplyTry page 2…
ReplyThere is zero reason to ever download, trial, or worse pay for winzip. 7-zip does more, is equally (more?) usable, and is free and open source, with regular releases for Windows.
ReplyJust because you prefer one bit of software over another, doesn’t mean you should be instructing others not to use it. Winzip has a different feature set to 7-Zip and they are certainly not equal. If others want to pay for or use Winzip, they are perfectly entitled to do so.
You should be happy there’s so much choice out there and people have options to choose what’s best for them.
ReplyFor me it’s just a matter of which looks nicer, i don’t need any of the extra things 7-zip does.
Replythank you sir raymond.
ReplyThank a billion! It perfectly works for most of my trial software.
God bless Devs from RunAsDate and also Mr. Raymon for giving us info about this amazing software.
ReplyGod bless Devs from RunAsDate and also Mr. Raymon for giving us info about this amazing software.
The first option worked for me. Thank you so much :)
ReplyPlease does this work on AutoCAD 2012. I just have 15days remaining.
ReplyAny body know how to reset trail date key
I look at the ResEdit only show date I try to download again yesterday
I want to know where is date it compair so I can change that date
Have to be 30 day Less than current date
I greatly appreciated if some can tell me where in registry I can change
ReplyI look at the ResEdit only show date I try to download again yesterday
I want to know where is date it compair so I can change that date
Have to be 30 day Less than current date
I greatly appreciated if some can tell me where in registry I can change
LIte Matt I can’t find the password – have downloaded the zip file but EVERYTHING needs a password? Any help would be great thank you
ReplyThe password is clearly stated on the download page…
Replycan someone tell me if this works for holdemresources? it does not work for me
ReplyFound a better way to extend trial:
Close Quickbooks
Delete all the files in this folder: C:ProgramDataIntuitEntitlement Clientv8
Then enter Quickbooks.
ReplyClose Quickbooks
Delete all the files in this folder: C:ProgramDataIntuitEntitlement Clientv8
Then enter Quickbooks.
Interesting that for example Sketchup Pro trial doesn’t need to be reset. Just switch off internet and change date to future like year 2050 and then install Sketchup. Do not run yet. Change date back to today and then delete %appdata%Sketchup and %localappdata%Sketchup and %programdata%sketchup. Then run it and it will have trial that doesn’t expire until year 2050.
ReplyAny suggestions for Toon Boom Harmony
ReplyI suggest to run any exe described here with sandboxie to isolate the damage and later delete the files from sandboxie. You also might like to use Oracle VM and mess as much as you like.
ReplyRunAsDate works perfect for any version of LabVIEW.
Thank you very much! It helped a lot.
ReplyDoes anyone know if RunAsDate works with QuickBooks. I’m in month 3 of a 6-month trial that came with a textbook for a class I’m taking. I still have time, but it would be so nice to be able to hang on to the software when the class is over.
ReplyVIRUS FOUND:
Trojan:Win32/Tulim.C!plock Alert Level: Severe
Trojan:Win32/Tulim.C!plock Alert Level: Severe
Category: Trojan
Description: This program is dangerous and executes commands from an attacker.
Recommended action: Remove this software immediately.
Items:
file:C:UsersUSERDownloadsTrial-Reset40FinalTrial-Reset40FinalPluginsReflexive.dll
Replyfile:C:UsersUSERDownloadsTrial-Reset40FinalTrial-Reset40FinalPluginsReflexive.dll
That is obviously a false positive and the file isn’t malicious, it happens a lot I’m afraid.
Like I say to everyone, if you are not comfortable, don’t use the program.
ReplyDoes any of this work for IDM? if so, which one works the best
ReplyWe’re not sure as we don’t use IDM, your only real option is to try things out and see…
ReplyI’d suggest trying Free Download Manager instead of trying to extend IDM. I used IDM initially but FDM is just as good if not better and, as the name suggests, free.
ReplyRather than extending it, why don’t you unlock it manually right away? There are lots of tricks available online!
ReplyAfter extracting and trying to run the application on windows for trial rest 4.0, it comes with an error.
ReplyHi – thank you so much for this blog. It has helped me a great deal!!
ReplyIt absolutely does work !
ReplyThanks for this much-awaited post. It is a boon for those who can not afford very high price of the software!
Replythe Trial-reste40final.zip needs a password to open. What is it?
ReplyThe password is listed on the page you downloaded the Trial-reste40final.zip from.
Glad you found it…
Reply