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Challenges with Trial Licensing When Tied to a MAC Address

System specifications:

The core issue stems from GraphPad binding trial machine usage to the MAC address. When a Fresh Start image is cloned, it normally inherits the same MAC address. Ordinarily this does not pose a problem, but in this case the application reports that the license has already been consumed, as it would on an earlier cloned instance. Even if the machine resides on a different server or datacenter—potentially in Germany or on another continent—this error will still appear. 

Therefore, the workaround consists of changing the MAC address. In Linux this is a straightforward and well-documented process, but under Windows it is less trivial.

Standard methods for altering the MAC address within Windows will not work, because the machine’s qemu.conf file overrides any in‑guest MAC modification. This means that even if you adjust the MAC address in Windows 10, the change alone will not solve the problem.

The reason is that the qemu.conf file specifies a MAC address that the VM uses. By modifying this setting, you can assign a different MAC address, thereby permitting the use of a different trial license key. 

However, for this approach to take effect, you must first set ‘Network Isolation’ on each machine to ‘Disabled’; after doing so, the MAC address defined in qemu.conf will be used.

If you encounter this problem, please reach out to DaDesktop Support for assistance.