How to stop Windows 8 Evaluation from automatic shutdown

If you are using Windows 8 Enterprise evaluation RTM as your primary OS, then you have made a big mistake. You probably should have installed it in an virtual environment .The evaluation period lasts for 90 days and after the trial period expires, it cannot be renewed even you have purchased genuine license, nor can it be downgraded or upgraded to another edition. So, what happens when the 90 day trial period expires? The answer is--automatic shutdown that gets triggered every hour. There are no warnings before shutdown and you will lose all of your work. Microsoft was very clear about this from the beginning and they have used similar tactics on previous version of Windows too.

Now, you have got no choice to install another version of windows. This can be a pain when you have no access to physical installation media and you may have problems getting other version of Windows from the internet. However, there is a solution to this. The automatic shutdown is the doing of a process/service that runs in the background and starts a timer that runs down when you have logged into your machine. This service is called "Windows Licence Monitoring Service". Well, you can guess what it does. It basically monitors the licence state of the machine and if it has expired, it triggers an automatic shutdown.  If you try to end this process through task manager then you will probably get blue screen of death (BSOD).

So, our solution to this problem is to remove the "Windows Licence Monitoring Service".
This tutorial is in no way meant to promote piracy but enable people who are stuck with running Windows 8 for an hour, to get and install another version of the Windows. So, here is how you do it.........

• First download Windows PsTools. This tool is provided by Microsoft for maintaining processes and services through command line.

          Download

• This tool is provided in zipped format and you need to extract it somewhere. 
• Create folder called - PS on C: drive
• We will extract all the contents of the zip file in C:\ drive into the folder PS (which we just created)
• After that you need to start command prompt with Administrator privileges. To do this--

        ---Open- task manager.
        ---Go to- File

        ---Create- New Task

        ---Check the "Create this task with administrator privileges" checkbox.

        ---Type- cmd

        ---Press- Enter

• You will see the command prompt.
• Type- c: 
• Type- cd /
• Type- cd PS
• Type- psexec -i -d -s cmd
• Click- Agree on the license agreement dialog box
• Then you will get another command prompt running under "nt authoriy\system"
• To check if the command prompt is running under "nt authority\system"--
• Type- whoami
  You should see nt authority\system.
• Type- sc delete WLMS
• Type- regedit
• The above command will open registry editor
• Navigate to- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE->System->CurrentControlSet->Services
• Locate- WLMS
• Right click the Key and press delete.
• Restart the computer

The simple way of doing it would be to open command prompt with administrator privileges and run the command  "sc delete WLMS" and then delete the WLMS key from the registry. However, if this doesn't work, you can try the above method which will work for sure..

Now your computer won't restart every hour. Best of luck.