Trial install – Don’t uninstall and reinstall - UPDATED

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We have gotten some reports from people having problems with the trial. Here are the repro steps:

  1. Down the OneNote 2007 trial
  2. Activate their product and see encounter a problem
  3. Uninstall OneNote
  4. Fix their problem
  5. Install trial again
  6. The trial says that it has expired : (

At this point customers can't do anything other than wait for the full product to come out in 2 months and purchase it then. You can only install the trial ONCE per machine. Please don't uninstall and reinstall as this will break your trial experience.

As Irina writes on the OneNote newsgroup:

To prevent fraud and misuse of trials it was decided to limit trial installs
to just single attempt per machine. If you uninstall your trial and then
install it again it'll tell you it's expired. There is no workaround to
enable the trial back on this machine apart from converting it to full build
(which isn't available yet to public).
Issues that people often try to solve by re-installing but which can be
solved without doing it:
- broken ink registration (get the prompt about Tablet SP2)
- missing Outlook or IE addins
- synchronization problems (e.g. some sections missing)
- on first boot after activation the trial doesn't allow editing (you need
to reboot OneNote)
- etc...

So just a word of caution to all of your trial users. Thank you to Irina for digging into this and posting the information to the newsgroup.

Update @ 12/7/2006 3:55 PM: I just heard that if you use the same key then you won't have a problem. Make sure to enter the same key you used the first time you downloaded and installed OneNote. So don't do a new key just because you redownloaded use the first key over. I hear that should work.

UPDATED @ 12/12/2006 5:05 PM: Here is some more info from Irina that she just posted on the newsgroup:

After additional investigation we found that the things aren't as bad as they seemed. The trial can be successfully reinstalled if you stick to the original product key you've installed it with.
So if you had to uninstall the trial and now need to download it from Office site again, please do so. After you fill in the registration page the site will issue you a new product key - discard it, start install of OneNote and enter your very first trial key you've got from the site (it should have been emailed to you).
Then your re-installed trial build will pick up the same expiration date as you had before uninstalling it.

Hope this helps!