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I am a web developer and most of the websites I work with still require Internet Explorer 8 support. I prefer to run the Windows XP virtual machine available at http://modern.ie/ for Internet Explorer 8 (as opposed to the Windows 7 virtual machine). It only lasts for 30 days, but it uses less resources than Windows 7.

Every time I use the Windows XP virtual machine, I get a notification of how many days are left until activation:

Screen shot of a balloon tip titled "30 days left for activation": To activate Windows now, click here

It gets old always having that notification pop up, so I'd like to disable it. To be clear, I'm not trying to get around the expiration of the virtual machine. In other words, I'm not trying to somehow thwart this dialogue box from appearing after the virtual machine's copy of Windows has expired:

Screen shot of a dialogue box titled "Windows Product Activation": This copy of Windows must be activated with Microsoft before you can log on. Do you want to activate Windows now?

All I want to do is disable the notification of how many days are left before I'll be locked out of the operating system. Can this be done?

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VM that you are using have 30 days timeout because that's how long unactivated version of Windows can run for. I see 3 possible options:

  • Hack/crack Windows activation files to remove that nag screen. Not going to talk about it here.
  • Enter a valid license key and activate that install of Windows.
  • Complain to MS to provide a more usable VM for development use.

You might not realize it, but IE8 in XP is different from Win7. XP's version does not support all of the SSL encryption features. See difference between IE 8 / XP and IE 8-10 / Win 7.

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