Windows XP Offline Activation Has Been Cracked

For those of you who have old hardware that you have no idea what to do with or are desperate for the nostalgia of firing up a copy of SimCity 2000, you should be aware that after 20+ years, off-line activation of Windows XP has been cracked.


According to this post at TinyApps you can now activate Windows XP offline.

Windows XP activation support ended on July 30, 2014. That means you can no longer activate or reactivate your Windows XP license online or by phone. So if you ever need to reinstall Windows XP on your old computer, you're out of luck....unless you had a backup of your activation files.

To do that, you go to the command prompt and type:

"xcopy %systemroot%\system32\wpa.dbl a:\" (No qutoes)

This will copy the file that contains your activation information to the floppy disk at a: --- assumed a floppy, given the circumstances.

In truth, this could help a few people out in the world. There is still a bit over a quarter million XP users out there (if I did my math right), and according to Wikipedia, half of Armenia still uses the OS. This makes sense, as the low hardware needs make for a really cheap PC if you can't afford a new one.

Honestly, I loved XP, and was a long-time holdout. But unless you are in a test environment or virtual server and not connected to the Internet XP in 2023 should not be run. Seriously, it's like a Swiss cheese of vulnerabilities. Then again - I could go for a quick few games of Minesweeper and a few Blue Screens before lunch.

On to Windows Vista!