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Month: July 2017

Bypass the Minitab 18 Registration Window

In my current job, I have to wrestle with getting a variety of software programs installed in a lab environment in a completely automated way. Some software makes this easier than others. Minitab used to be one of the easier ones, but with version 18 it has become a little harder.

As far as I can remember, when you silently installed Minitab 17 with a network license there was no need to register it on the first run. (I could be mistaken, but my notes from last year don’t indicate I had to do anything special.) With Minitab 18 you must register with an email address, first name, and last name on the first launch. I could almost handle this by including it in the image I capture, but I prefer to install small programs like this at the time of deployment.

After a bit of investigating and testing, I’ve found a way to get around this registration requirement on first launch. All you need to do is drop a file named License.ini in C:\ProgramData\Minitab with the following contents:

That’s it. On first launch Minitab 18 will see these prepopulated items, fill in the remaining items, and move on as if it were already registered. I’m not sure if anything is case sensitive or if the blank lines are required, but I know what I’ve listed above works for me. The email address you enter should be of valid format but it doesn’t need to be an actual address. For example, [email protected] will work just fine. Here’s a sample completed file:

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