How To: Re-Use Expired Trial Demo Softwares or Applications

The suggestions that I am about to reveal here are for educational purposes only for your added knowledge purposes only and I accept no responsibility for the user ACTUALLY attempting to bypass demo restrictions using my ideas. Also, I have never tried what I am about to reveal in any of my PC(s) with ANY demos but I know it works given the fact how Deep Freeze function.
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Why not just purchase deep freeze standard for about 20 bucks(if I am not mistaken) and make that the *ONLY* software investment you ever have to make? By that, I mean that deep freeze will preserve your system baseline configuration down to its last byte. But first, install all the demo softwares you can ever think of needing to have, then install deep freeze and the demo “uses” will always reset each time you reboot (perfect for these yahoo demo game downloads/some programs that comes with 15/30/etc demo “uses” (as in 15 times you are allowed to open and close the game) before it expires – with NO date expiration.
UPDATE:
My trick will work ONLY for demos that limits you on the number of times you can run the application, but does not give you like 30 days (date types of expiration). If your demo gives you like 30 days to use it, then you are better off using the poster’s application data trick, but you can also use the deep freeze trick in conjunction so you would not have to worry about those demos that limit you on a “x – uses” level. Another thing you can do with the demos that expires on date based, is once you install the demo DONT RUN IT YET, first install deep freeze, then reboot, and THEN run the demo, the thing is that most demo starts their “counter” the first time you run it AFTER install. If you have one of those rare programs that starts counting immediately after you install even without first running it the first time, and that software happens to be not so big (like no more than 50MB the installer) something you can just re-install very quickly, then after you have installed deep freeze just install that demo software each and every time you need to use it after a shutdown/restart and you never have to worry about it again.

Side effects (and its cure):
Since deep freeze preserves your PC down to its last byte, this mean that if you download any music off limewire (example) or you save any documents and then you restart your PC, (or ANYTHING you do AFTER deepfreeze is installed) its GONE. To remedy this, just install deep freeze with thawspace (space allocated that is not protected by deepfreeze so you can save regular user data), you will be able to create thawspaces if you have the “configurator administrator” edition of deep freeze (is more expensive) if you are like most individuals and just go for the standard version then unfortunately that will not give you that option, but there is STILL a solution, just repartition your hard drive into two partitions, leave about 10 GB for drive C (Partition 0) and the rest hundreds other GB’s for Drive D (Partition 1) using your favorite repartitioning resizing/restructuring software so you can preserve your documents, etc then format as NTFS that second partition (I like to use gparted, a linux liveCD, but it’s not the easiest one to manage by computer novices since you can easily accidentally move the boot sector making your hard drive not bootable, but a computer novice might not know how to move the boot sertor back to its right place, so gparted is not for every 1, there are easier partition software out there, just google it/compare, etc).

After your partition C and D are created, go to download TweakUP utility (assuming you are using Windows XP), but first you have to copy your documents, desktop and favorites folder to drive D, for that, click on Start and click on RUN and type CMD and press Enter per each line.
run the following command while making sure you are logged in the correct user account that you would like to be able to save things when deep freeze is installed:
md d:\user
md d:\user\documents
md d:\user\desktop
md d:\user\favorites
cd %userprofile%
xcopy “documents\*.*” d:\user\documents /h /e /y
xcopy desktop\*.* d:\user\desktop /h /e /y
xcopy favorites\*.* d:\user\favorites /h /e /y
the install TweakUP UI which you dowloaded.

in tweak up simply expand My Computer and click on “special folders” and change Desktop to d:\user\desktop
change My Documents to d:\user\documents
change favorites to d:\user\favorites
log off and log back on, on same user profile
you are all set for deep freeze now.

Resolving the Antivirus UPDATES getting erased each time you reboot because of deep freeze:
since deep freeze will be protecting drive C and ONLY drive C, not drive D (so you can be able to save files), it is important that you install your antivirus software on drive D. For that, go to my computer and enter drive D, then create a new folder called “Program Files” and then simply direct your antivirus software to be installed on d:\program files, during installation. Current antivirus software that I have tested and confirmed not to modify any registry key during a regular virus definition update making it work effectively with this method:
-Comodo Internet Security from comodo.com (one of the best AV there)
-Avast from avast.com
-NOD32 (not free)
I didn’t test any other AV software but most should work.

after you have done all the above, install deep freeze and protect just drive C.

Good Luck.
Remember, if you dont have the required PC expertise level (medium/hard:70/100) to carry out all the above tasks, then it is better that you call your friend/family member that knows a lot about computer, or get PC technical services from a qualified PC tech to assist you in these procedures.

UPDATE:
In addition to the Deep Freeze solution, there is an even easier solution for those of you who doesn’t want to go thru the hassle of creating a secondary partition for your read/write/savings location. Now, you can use a program called “SandBoxie”, just install your Demo software, but dont run the demo software yet, THEN right click on the shortcut that corresponds to the demo software and from the pulldown menu select “Run Sandboxed”, that will run, just that software, plus all of its traces in an environment equal to Deep Freeze. And when you close the demo software and re run it the next time under the Sand Boxed environment, the demo software will completely “forget” that you had runned it previously and will always think that you ran it the first time.

A good strategy would be to, once that you installed the program, define the demo program’s root directory as a sandboxed folder. For example, lets say that you install the demo version of Ulead GIF Animator 5. By default it gets installed to: c:\program files\Ulead after you do the installation, you DONT RUN the program yet, you go ahead and add “c:\program files\ulead” onto sandboxie configuration telling it that anything that executes from that folder must be run in a sandboxed environment.

Now, for demo programs that start counting its expiration dates since you install it without running it first (a few of them do that, but the vast mayority waits till you execute them at least one time before starting the counter), for THESE programs, you might want to create a special folder for them, such as in C:\Sandboxed_Jailed_Programs and choose to install those programs into that folder while having it previously configured sandboxed to monitor this folder. Now the thing here is, that anything you install onto this folder gets erased when you close the demo program plus every changes done to your system gets undone too, so you will need to reinstall that demo software onto this folder each time you need to use it. But, like I said before, the vast majority of the demo software waits till you execute it the first time before telling you that its a time limited or tries limited version, etc, etc….. So for those mayority of software, you can just install in the normal way to c:\program files\./n (where ./n represents the name of the software’s folder to install) and then set “./n” (the direct folder where your demo software got installed) as a sandboxed folder before you execute the software right after installation.

So, thorugh sandboxie, it makes things alot simpler now for the mayority of users.