Trial Expired CS

I installed the trial version of CS a few days ago. I fired it up, and naturally it said I had 30 days left. Out of simple curiousity, I changed my clock/date to March, hit apply and then attempted to reopen CS. Yea, it said "trial expired". Well, that was that. I corrected my date, went back to it, but it still said "trial expired". I uninstalled, reinstalled, trial expired. Obviously a switch is set somewhere outside of the registry and the normal folders. Does anyone know where that can be reset? I suppose the answer would kill any more sales of CS, since that would betray their 30 day trial period protection. I have to ask. I just never had a chance to test this thing and I apparently never will, short of reformatting my hard drive. Thanks in advance.

The program is designed to time out if one changes their system clocks - otherwise, one could keep the trial going indefinitely.

Reformat is the only way you are going to get the trial working again ... pretty severe way to get around a trial period, eh? ;)

Wanted to be wise, setting a date for the next century.
Adobe's programmers are not stupid.

Sounds like you already had an idea of what might happen before you first changed your clock. You tried it, you got burned, and now you want help getting out of your self-inflicted mess.

You know just enough to be stupid, and almost enough to be dangerous.

Reformat you sense of ethics while you're scraping the bits off your hard drive.

It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.

In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

- Homer

As the others have pointed out, you played Russion roulette and lost. The only way now is to reformat your harddrive.

Bob

Man, why are we coming down hard on the OP? If he/she had responded with bad attitude, I could see it, but he/she was just asking if there was a way out of the problem. Self inflicted or not, we can politely explain there is no way out of the problem.

Don,

which is what I did in the first answer. :)

grasshopper

Yes GH. I was referring to the following messages.

:)

:(

You'd have to set up a new partition and install a second copy of XP, then the Pro trial version on it. Test to your heart's delight for a month and then buy it or lose it. This is a less drastic than reformatting, but it's only a temporary solution. Remember too, that curiousity killed the cat. Toying with system dates can cause all sorts of other problems. Peter Cowie
"Highpox1" wrote in message

I installed the trial version of CS a few days ago. I fired it up, and

naturally it said I had 30 days left. Out of simple curiousity, I changed my clock/date to March, hit apply and then attempted to reopen CS. Yea, it said "trial expired". Well, that was that. I corrected my date, went back to it, but it still said "trial expired". I uninstalled, reinstalled, trial expired. Obviously a switch is set somewhere outside of the registry and the normal folders. Does anyone know where that can be reset? I suppose the answer would kill any more sales of CS, since that would betray their 30 day trial period protection. I have to ask. I just never had a chance to test this thing and I apparently never will, short of reformatting my hard drive. Thanks in advance.

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Thanks for the feedback (vicious and nice). I figured as much. I just was wondering if anyone out there ever searched for that hidden file Adobe had created with that silly little switch in it. Interesting that PSP (Paint Shop Pro) has never employed that theory. If you download the trial version of that, you are allowed 60 days I believe. But when that expires, you can change your computer date back to within the 60 days it was installed and, Voila, it thinks it's back in the trial period....FYI.

Which is exactly why Adobe won't do that! If you like the program enough after the trial period, they want you to buy it. By resetting the clock and allowing the program to continue, they would lose sales. I mean how many folks would bother to shell out the kind of money that Photoshop costs, if they could get a fully functional copy that easily?

But when that expires, you can change your computer date back to within the 60 days it was installed and, Voila, it thinks it's back in the trial period....

That kind of defeats the purpose for them being in the software business, though, doesn't it?

If you like it, it should take less than two months to tell. For most people, Photoshop Elements in more than enough (just a few features are missing, like no CMYK support), and you can get it cheap--cheaper than PSP--or bundled with things like scanners. I'd download the Photoshop Elements demo and try again... on second thought, it's good stuff, you will like it, and it doesn't require Activation... so just head down to a discount house (CostCo, Wal-Mart...) and pick-up a copy.

Thanks R_harvey. I'll look into that tomorrow...

I think he was being facitious. :)

Oh, I don't know, tomorrow is another day. I think Highpox1 meant it.

I wish I'd mentioned earlier that you can probably get more than you paid for from Photoshop Elements, if you decide later to use it to trade-up to the super-duper, giant-size, $649 version.

I didn't realize that PE doesn't have color management until Len mentioned it in another post. While I'd still agree that PE is a great program for the money, it seems that lack of color management would be a real pain when wanting to match on-screen color to printed results. I wonder if PaintShop Pro employs color management?

PSE2 offers this:

( ) No color management
( ) Limited color management - optimized for Web graphics ( ) Full color management - optimized for Print

And you can save with an ICC color profile.

Speeling chalenged :(