Longhorn Expire Too Soon

[AnAverageGuy]

My windows longhorn virtual machine has a problem with activation, this goes for all builds. When compared to windows xp, xp works perfectly, the time it takes until the activation time period is over is as always, 30 days. Although, with windows longhorn, it starts at a mere 14 days, giving less time to use it. And then after I leave the vm for a while, when I log back in, first it says that I need a new password for my user account, and then after I apply it, it immediately tells me that time to activate has been over. So, not only does it give me 14 days, also the same day, it tells me time is up. I have watched many upon many tutorials and none of them recognize nor mention this problem, on top of that I’m not even sure if you can active windows on vbox at all. If this has a fix it would be highly appreciated.

[BillG]

Why are you trying to install a pre-release version of Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008? Why not use the release version?

[AnAverageGuy]

It’s just kinda cool, I like the build’s environment, I do have vista though.

[FranceBB]

Short version:
It's almost definitely another doesn't-matter-horn bug.

Long version:
As Dave Cutler (one of the best M$ developers) said in an interview he had with Dave Plummer (the creator of task manager), back when Longhorn was created the marketing guys couldn't wait for the code reviews and they had the idea to split the codebase between the user edition of windows and the server edition. The user version - what ended up becoming vista - was developed by a team and the idea was to get out as many features as possible as "home users don't expect the same quality that server people do". At the same time, the server version was created by the Dave Cutler team and they took their time to address all the issues and make it stable. By the time Vista was out, the situation became so bad that not only people complained but some of the bugs were so bad that even led to security issues that needed to be solved. The server guys stepped in to solve the most critical bugs and slowly but surely their branch was eventually selected to be the stable one for both server and consumer. At that point, there was a recurring joke at M$ where everyone called Longhorn "doesn't matter horn" as it didn't really matter any longer and that branch simply died. Ever since that day, the server edition and consumer edition always come from the same codebase.

P.s in case you're curious, I really suggest you to check Dave Plummer's YouTube channel. Now that he retired from Microsoft he explained a lot of things of the past and he interviewed some of the people who made history at Microsoft including Raymond Chen and Dave Cutler.

[AnAverageGuy]

Thank you so much! Very appreciated!