How to Extend the Trial Period of a Software

 

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. The amount of days given to try are normally 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 the software protection has gotten 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 protector drops an 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 CCleaner ( Uninstaller) uninstal the program and then clear registry using ccleaner.

after that clear the trial licence with Trial Reset /Registry Trash Keys Finder.
Trial-Reset 4.0 is the final version released 2 years ago by The Boss that is able to scan and remove 45 types of commercial and freeware protector including some software that uses custom protector 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, 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.

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 shareware. 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 

Registry Trash Keys Finder would be a better solution today 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, but there is a limitation 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 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 CCleaner ( uninstaller and registry cleaner)
Download Trial Resetter 4.0 (search & deleted left registri trial)
Download Registry Trash Keys Finder (Search & deleted left registry trial)  

after that install again the software trial day it will reset to 1 day used.