Saturday 1 April 2017

Easy2Boot goes commercial - April Fool!

All versions of Easy2Boot produced for over a year now, have contained some embedded code which will check the BIOS date. If the BIOS date is more than 30 days from today, then certain functions (e.g. automatic menu building, QRUN feature, WIM and VHD booting, etc.) will no longer work unless a licence is found.

Switch_E2B.exe, MakePartImage and UEFI-booting from .imgPTN files will not check for a licence however and will work as before.

Don't worry though, because you will be able to purchase a licence for just £20 (details of how to pay to be disclosed very soon - it will NOT be via PayPal donation). As long as you buy a licence within the next 30 days, E2B will continue to work just the same as before. If you have already made a donation of £20 or more, you will be sent a free licence file within 30 days.

You simply add your licence file to the E2B USB drive and run a special E2B_Licence.cmd script (to be supplied with the licence file). The script will check the licence file number via the internet and if it is valid, it modifies some sectors on the USB drive. From then on, E2B will simply check the special 'licence' sectors each time it boots (as a form of file copy protection). If any licence file is distributed illegally, then it will not validate via the internet and will be blacklisted.

The licence-protection system is not foolproof though and I hope it will not be hacked/abused too much.

I regret that this has been necessary for the following reasons:
  1. Increasing maintenance costs of the site
  2. Brexit and changing UK tax laws
  3. Increased personal costs - my mother-in-law has now gone into a care home due to poor health, also my cat (Theo) nearly died a few months ago and required an expensive operation (£900!) (he is well now though!)

Scroll down for more important details...






















































OK - it's now past midday in the UK - did I fool you (tick funny if I didn't)?

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