Archives for: April 2011

I'm very excited to announce that Tech Ed Europe 2012 will be held 25th-29th June at the Amsterdam RAI Exhibition Centre in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. More information here!

Cool to have Tech Ed in my home country! Hope to see you al there!

In this post I want to share how you can activate your Windows server or desktop installation with ConfigMgr when you do not have a KMS server in place.

To script the activation we use a Windows built-in visual basic script named slmgr.vbs and is located in c:\windows\system32.

First of all we make a simple batch file by opening notepad. In the file type the first command:

cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk AAAAA-AAAAA-AAAAA-AAAAA-AAAAA

With /ipk switch we can specify the key we want to use to activate Windows. Keep in mind that there are multiple types of keys. When you enter an invalid key you might receive the following error message:

On a computer running Microsoft Windows non-core edition, run 'slui.exe 0x2a 0xC
004F015' to display the error text.
Error: 0xC004F015

The differences between the keys are described in this Microsoft article:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff793412.aspx

Now we only entered our key so the second step is to register the key with Microsoft Online for the actual activation, using an internet connection. To active the key online type the second command:

cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ato

So your batch file should just look like this:

cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk AAAAA-AAAAA-AAAAA-AAAAA-AAAAA
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ato

Save this notepad file as a batch file and create a ConfigMgr package for it and deploy it to your systems and you can also use it within your Task Sequences when you deploy new systems.

More information and options you can use for the slmgr.vbs script can be found here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff793433.aspx