[archival jazz tunes]
Greetings folks! And today I've got a rather silly idea.
I'm gonna register my copy of WinRAR.
Yes, WinRAR. The file compression and decompression utility
that's arguably most famous for being the program that no one ever registers. It's been around
since the mid 90s in various forms. And for years, I'd say probably till around 2003 or 4,
it was my go-to file archiving program, simply because it handled the most compression formats
and it was free to use. Effectively, anyway. Because WinRAR's whole thing was that it started
you off with a 40-day free trial that, after that was over, you were expected to pay for it.
The thing is, once the 40 days passed, it still lets you use it forever. All you had to do was
wait for the nag screen to let you through and that was that. So it earned this reputation as
the paid program that no one ever paid for. Even more so than competitors like WinZip,
which was more restrictive after its trial period ended. As a result, WinRAR's infinite 40-day
trial has been continuously discussed in various articles, forums, subreddits, and YouTube videos
over the years, with folks wondering how RAR Lab could possibly profit as a business from such a
weird sales strategy or lack of sales, I guess? Now the short answer is enterprise users are still
expected to pay for it. So a majority of RAR Lab's cashflow comes from large group licenses.
The other reason that they did it this way is as a kind of anti-piracy measure where the idea is,
hey, why would anyone bother to pirate the full version when the trial version of WinRAR remains
usable forever, with only a nag screen getting in the way? I think perhaps they underestimate
the sheer pettiness and free time of software pirates. But that's beside the point because
the fact remains that practically no home user of WinRAR ever had much reason to pony
up the cash and register the program. Including myself, until today, doing it for the clicks.
So yeah, my goal with this video is pretty simple. I just wanna register a copy of WinRAR and see
what that's like after 25 or however many years of using it off and on. And we're also gonna try
it out on some different older operating systems as well because it's LGR and that's what I do. I'm
curious if the current registration information, whatever that is, still applies to old versions of
WinRAR. So I guess we will see. Yeah, let's just go ahead and do that. See what happens
with some WinRAR registration. RARrerrr. It's a weird word. Alrighty, bout to register WinRAR
like a mad man. So let's see, we do have a couple of different links here for WinRAR and that would
be the WinRAR.com website and then RARlab.com, which was what I remember from back in the day.
I think this other one here is just the publisher Win.RAR GmbH. Whereas RARLab,
this is like the official website and it's been like this pretty much as long as I can remember.
Both of them eventually go through the same checkout thing, CleverBridge. So screw that.
We're gonna go with the OG website because it makes me happy and look how simple it still is.
2002 to 2021. So yeah, I guess this one's been here since 2002. I guess there was actually a
new version of it in December of 2020, that's the latest one. Yeah. I honestly haven't used WinRAR
in so many years, you know, as my normal archiver. I've been using 7-Zip since like the mid 2000's.
So I'm kind of curious what the new one even is like. But yeah, "buy WinRAR archiver." So check
this out. We can go with one user or multi-user licenses. Get 1000 copies WinRAR! No, we're just
gonna go with the regular one here and here we go. Online storefront. Same as the other one.
Pretty much we're going through the same CleverBridge company. And it's $29 for the standard electronic
delivery version. Again, the same as it's been since forever, as far as I can remember. And
also a "physical delivery on CD" option. I mean, I've gotta do that.
[chuckles in optical media]
I'm sure it's gonna be some garbage CD-R with a horrible label, but who knows? We'll see.
Alrighty. Just gonna go in and enter in my crap. Skip ahead here cuz, you know.
"Buy now."
Ooh, no going back. All right! And there we go. "Download and install your WinRAR key."
Got some troubleshooting and I got a physical delivery on the way.
Yeah. I will do a follow-up video about that on my LGR Blerbs channel. We'll see what that is,
but for now lets download and install it. Ooh, such uncharted territory. Look at this. "How to
register." So, pretty simple. You get a key to download. It's a key *file.* Interesting. Not
a serial or anything. So that does make me wonder if it will work with any older ones.
I don't know. I guess I've never registered this. So cool. I guess we'll download it.
Oh no! Cant open the page. Huh!
Okay. So Chrome works, but Safari doesn't. Whatever, that's what I
get for trying to capture with a Mac, I guess? All right. Let's move over to a windows PC and install
WinRAR with my brand new $30 registration key that I bought so you don't have to.
Okay. I got the rarkey.rar RAR, RAR, RAR.
And we can open it up in 7-Zip ironically. So we've got a key file and
a readme. Let's see here. “Thanks for registering WinRAR.” You're welcome. Better late than never.
You know, so I do have WinRAR 6 installed and I skipped ahead the time past the 40 days. So this
is what you get when the trial runs out and then we can just click off and you can still use it
without registering. You just get that nag screen at the beginning and that's it. So we'll do that.
Open with this which I just installed. And yeah, there we go. It's been successfully registered, so.
Look at that. Registered it to me. How exciting. Single PC usage license.
Fancy. Well now to see if this functions with older versions as well. I'm gonna go back to,
I don't know, Windows XP, and then we're gonna try like Windows 95 and 3.1. I don't know. Just we'll
keep going until it doesn't work. It might not work on anything older than this. Well,
I don't know. We'll see you in a sec. Let's go ahead and find out.
[jazz music fades]
[Windows XP startup sound]
Okay! Got Windows XP going here and some things on a USB drive. So we're gonna start with WinRAR
4.0. A couple of versions back from -- I guess 2011. Okay. It's a little newer than I thought,
but we'll try it. All right. There's that. "Please purchase WinRAR,
note that it is not free. After 40 day trial, you must either buy a license or remove it from
your computer." Or not! Let's see if we can register it using the same key file.
[bloop!] Eh!
Hey, so that still works. All right. So this one is registered to me as well. 4.0.
Let's go back to 3.0 and see if that works. [Windows 98 startup sound]
All right. Moving on down to Windows 98 second edition. Let's see what we can do here.
Yay, floppy disks. That's that's more like it. Look at that classic logo.
Crazy this was still 2002. Seems older than that somehow. And here we go. 40 day trial
period ended with the time set forward on the computer clock and we'll see what happens.
Well, all right. So it still works on the 2002 version. WinRAR 3.0.
registered to me once again with a 2021 key. Let's go back to 2.0.
[Windows 95 startup sound]
Oh yeah, Windows 95. We'll see what we can do with WinRAR 2.
Mmm, gettin' older. WinRAR is 32 bit
Windows version of RAR. So we've gone 32 bit from 16 bit Windows 3.1. Got different interface
options, it looks like we can go with both 3.1 interface and 95. Okay. Different libraries,
program groups, all the typical stuff in terms of associations.
Mmkay, let's open up the 95 version here.
Not seeing any nag screen. And I have moved the time forward, past the evaluation
period. Ooh. Now this is different. You got a straight up registration code and some other
stuff. So this might be the limit. Here's the 3.1 style interface right here. This one doesn't
have a nag screen either. It doesn't seem. Yeah. There's no mention of the 40-day thing. I mean,
it's totally described in the license section of the help file. "Anyone that used this software
during a test period of 40 days following this, he must register." But it doesn't seem like it's gonna
bother you if you don't. Wow. That's even more generous. Just curious though. We gotta try and
see if somehow it recognizes that key file, but I have my doubts at this point. It is opening it.
Wow. Nope. It sees that the files are there, but that's it. So it technically doesn't even open
this RAR file. So something definitely changed quite a bit between 2.0 and 3.0, in terms of
the way it reads RAR files, I guess? And also by the way that registration is taken care of.
Interesting. I didn't know that. I've actually never used a version of it that old. Aight.
Just out of curiosity, I'm going to look in that key file, see if maybe there's a registration code in
there and then just type in my name. I don't know.
Yeah, definitely not. It's this gigantic string
of numbers and letters that goes well beyond this field of the registration code area.
So that totally doesn't work. There is definitely a hard cutoff. That being said, I'm willing to bet
it's pretty easy to find one of these old serials
online still? Let me just look one up. I'm just curious.
Yep. One came up pretty easily. So let's just see here.
[light chuckle] Well! That answers that.
So yeah it's just a straight up name and serial number. Yeah. It's now registered.
[chuckles]
Not that there was really anything in the way of anything at all. Like I said, there was no nag
screen on this version. Totally registered the 16 bit version as well. Look at that.
So ancient serial number from some ancient website still totally works. I'm assuming that's why they
changed it between going from 16 bit versions over to 32 bit. 3.0 and onward are gonna rely
on that key file and it still totally works. It is valid from the current way of registering
WinRAR on the modern website, so. Ahh, y'know I dunno what we learned here but we learned something.
Probably not useful, but whatever. That's pretty much it for this video. I hope that you enjoyed
seeing this kind of silliness. I just like messing around with things like this every so often. And
I was kind of hoping that we'd get a Windows 3.1 version working with the modern key as well. But
hey, I'm kind of surprised it went back as far as it did, period. So anyway, it's back to working on
the other videos that I had going and didn't quite get finished. Yeah. That's kind of why I did this
is -- I didn't have enough time to complete the project that I was working on for today.
So we got this instead. I hope that you enjoyed it regardless and stick around for other LGR
things each week here on this very channel. And as always, thank you very much for RAR-ing!