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Where do the 30-day trial versions of products (lets say Photoshop, for example) store the information that I've used 30 days up, or not? In the registry? In a folder dedicated to this? In a "secret" folder?
Not that I'm going to use this information for "evil" (forms evil plan), but I was curious. Will "cleaning" out my registry, using Piriform's CCleaner, for example, remove these "trial keys"?
I'd figure many also register it in the cloud, but I don't know for a fact. Doing so, no matter how thorough you wipe your hard disk, your computer will still be known as being registered based on its installed hardware. Like Windows Product Activation.
– Arjan – 2011-02-11T08:44:27.597@Arjan What if you block it using your firewall? – Mateen Ulhaq – 2011-02-12T00:43:55.537
That totally depends. Windows won't activate then and nag you about it, eventually falling back to a limited version, for what I've read. Other software might not run at all, or run unlimited, I assume. Or might not update itself, which is a huge risk, especially for software that is used to open things your downloaded from the internet. (You wouldn't want to use an outdated PDF viewer or Flash player.) Another aside: you never know if unregistered software somehow advertises itself. Like Photoshop could add watermarks to files you create? (I'm not saying it does.) – Arjan – 2011-02-12T12:34:56.577