SpecSheet
Licence and activation
What $29.99 buys, what stays free for ever, and what activating actually sends.
What is free and what is not
| Free | Licensed | |
|---|---|---|
| Scan a machine, read every fact on screen | Yes | Yes |
| Collect the administrator-only sections | Yes | Yes |
| Save as a page, or as data | No | Yes |
| Copy as text | No | Yes |
| Print, or save as PDF | No | Yes |
| Screenshot the window | No | Yes |
| Make a licensed USB stick | No | Yes |
Nothing about what SpecSheet measures sits behind the licence. The unlicensed window reads the machine exactly as the licensed one does and hides none of it from you. What you are paying for is the artefact: a document with the machine's name and the scan time on it that you can hand to somebody else.
One key, one PC
One licence key covers one PC: the PC SpecSheet is installed on. The PCs you sell never need a key: they are scanned from a USB stick that your licensed PC makes, and nothing is installed on them. A shop with two workstations buys two keys.
Activating the same PC again, after reinstalling SpecSheet, uses nothing up. To move a key to another PC, choose Licence, then Remove this licence from this PC, on the old one. If the old PC is gone - Windows reinstalled, or the PC replaced - remove it from your licence page instead.
What activating sends
Activation sends two things to activate.probe-specsheet.com:
your licence key,
and a one-way fingerprint of the PC you are activating —
a hash of the Windows installation id, which cannot be turned back into
anything that identifies the machine.
It sends nothing about the machine you scanned. Not a serial, not a UUID, not a MAC address, not a fact, not a count, not the report. SpecSheet hides those from a screenshot by default; it is not going to post them to a server.
Back comes a signed permission slip, which SpecSheet keeps on that PC. From then on it is checked offline, every time the program starts. No network, no check-in, no phoning home — which matters, because the place this tool is most useful is a workshop with no Wi-Fi.
A licensed USB stick
From a licensed PC you can write SpecSheet onto a USB stick, with a signed permission slip that works only on that stick and only for 30 days. Take it to a machine that has never seen SpecSheet, run it, and get the full licensed program with no install and no network.
Plug the stick back into any licensed PC to extend it by another 30 days. Nothing on the stick contains your licence key, so a stick you lose cannot be turned into somebody else's licence — it simply stops working.
The permission slip names the stick by the serial number the drive itself reports. Most drives report one; a few very cheap ones do not, and SpecSheet will say so and ask for a different stick rather than writing one that would refuse to run.
Version 1.x is yours
A licence runs every 1.x release for ever. There is no subscription and nothing expires. When version 2.0 arrives it will be a paid upgrade, and your 1.x licence will go on running every 1.x build exactly as it always did.
If something goes wrong
Every refusal SpecSheet shows you says what happened and what to do about it — a licence file that belongs to another PC says so, an expired stick says so, a PC whose clock is wrong says that rather than blaming your licence. If one of them leaves you stuck, write to [email protected] and quote the sentence you were shown.