Hi Neil,
Simple answer? It shouldn’t occur. The reactivation process in PS CS is flawed and sometimes has been known to randomly prompt for reactivation. Unfortunately Adobe actions thus far indicate they are ignoring the problem. While some issues appear to have been addressed in PS CS2, hopefully you’ll not feel forced to upgrade simply to avoid this problem if you’re otherwise happy with PS CS. Moreover, who is to say that PS CS2 won’t demonstrate similar problems? One random, erroneous reactivation prompt out of 100 or 1000 uses may seem like an innocuous problem to Adobe, but given that the application is designed to wholly shut out access when reactivation, that still is not acceptable in my opinion and represents a serious flaw. At a bare minimum, Adobe should provide a 7-day grace period of continued use of Photosho when reactivation is deemed necessary.
Regards,
Daryl
neil, i agree w/daryl, it shouldn’t happen, but doesn’t the activation screen give you a phone # to call if the internet is unavalable? were you also away from a phone for 2 weeks?
dave
Hi Daryl
As I had Photoshop 7 and CS is an upgrade from that, I guess I will just have to live with it. The program is otherwise fine. The only feature that I use frequently that one cannot obtain in Elements 2, is the clipping pen.
I really appreciate your prompt response to my query.
Regards
Neil
Hi Dave
Thank you for replying. But no, there was no phone number given. And as I live in England and the incident happened during during a family visit to Hawaii, somehow, there didn’t seem an easy way to deal with the problem.
Regards
Neil
Doing a system restore in XP is sufficient to trigger a re-activation request.
I’m not a troublemaking type (honest) but I think both Neil and David should make formal complaints to Adobe. Maybe this will have no effect but each instance of denied legitimate usage should be reported.
Neil,
Your situation raises a question I’ve not thought of before. I wonder if Adobe has a consolidated database of all activations worldwide, so that regardless of where you call from, your activation history can be verified? If not, then I’d nearly bet that while in Hawaii you could have called the U.S. phone number for product activation and been back in business as if this had been a new activatoin, again assuming you had access to a phone line which it sounds like you did. If the databases are consolidated, then at worst you might’ve had to talk to Customer Service in the even reactivation was denied. I gather that your reactivation dialog may only have provided a number for calling in the U.K. and thus it was the absence of a U.S. number at the time that was the problem?
Regards,
Daryl
The activation dialogue (in CS2) has a drop down list of countries so it should provide a number for any location. Even on an International English install and with my location information correctly set on the PC it still defaults to USA so you need to select the UK from the list anyway.
I think the activation database probably is global the Adobe user accounts are, if I log on via the US website I get the same information i.e. products registered as I do from the UK site.
Well, just about 10 minutes ago I became a member of this "bogus activation request" group. I am in south Florida and a thunderstorm started to come through. As a precaution I made a restore point, opened CS and got the "or else" activation demand telling me that I had changed my configuration.
I attempted reactivation by phone, but it wouldn’t accept my displayed activation number. I had to speak to a service rep. (Jason was excellent), and the problem is solved for now.
Not a great inconvenience, but an inconvenience nonetheless. I sympathize with Neil.
Yes, it didn’t take me long and I did by phone but MY time isn’t worthless either. This is a quality issue. It must be addressed.
Blake
Are you really saying that creating a restore point caused a reactivation. That is really strange.
Mick, Neil, and others, I’ve called Adobe with my complaint that I had to re-activate and they wanted me to believe that I was the only one who has had a problem with it. I’m sure if you call they can tell you the same thing.
I’ve sent in my thoughts to Adobe’s Activation Feedback section. They of course, never replied even though they wanted an e-mail address from me.
As you can see from reading through the various threads on activation/re-activation, various things trigger the need to re-activate. Further, things that cause it for some folk, don’t cause it for others.
Adobe knows they have problems and they don’t care. At least it doesn’t seem they care about the customer.
it’s such a shame that in only a few days we’ve gone from praising a really amazing upgrade to griping about a flawed "utility" that ships with it. too bad.
<
http://www.bricklin.com/robfuture.htm>
maybe they’ll pull a VisiCalc… rememeber them? Thought not…
Ya’ know, I’m tired of all this griping, you got ripped off the first time, you got ripped off again.
Adobe views you as a walking wallet and as long as you vote with it, they do not care about the activation problems.
Get a gripe, quit buying the upgrades until they solve the problem. In this case, if they merge with MM, they’ll see how they do it, but until then, keep your money in your wallet.
If you really, really need it, then just get a bootleg. I’m goin’ net shoppin’.
Hi Daryl
I didn’t have the time to get into phoning Adobe in the US. As I said earlier I was visiting family. Without getting too personal, my wife’s mother was dying in Hawaii at that time and worrying about something wrong with Photoshop was the last thing on my mind. I guess that under normal circumstances I would have tried phoning someone.
Regards
Neil
you got ripped off the first time, you got ripped off again
Must admit I’ve not personally been troubled by activation problems (hope that’s not speaking too soon!). However, Blake’s problem was with CS1. So tell me: Are people experiencing similar problems with CS2? Or have Adobe addressed the problem?
If the latter, I would have thought some sort of minor update to cure the CS1 issue would be an enormous PR coup – and worth more to Adobe than any paid for advertising!
Chris.
No change from CS1 to CS2 🙁 in fact I didnt have a problem with CS1 just CS2, caused by Acrobat 7 in CS2 Premium using up my activations. I have now gone back to using Acrobat 6 from CS1 on the desktop.
I have seen Activation Server Unavailable errors which I dont remember from CS1. I got this on the laptop several times and I have seen others report it.
So from my own experience I would say activation is more flaky in CS2
This is getting so weird! First, Adobe blamed other software used on machines with CS1, like System Restore, for CS requiring re-activation. Now their own software, Acrobat, is forcing the issue? Now that IS flaky!!!
Looks like their program don’t play well together. Think Adobe’s gonna rush that info to their investors?
I think it is an Acrobat 7 problem, apparently there are some issues with RAID, which I dont have but I do have multiple SCSI hard drives also likely candidates are system utilities e.g. anti-virus and anti-spyware, firewalls etc. There are some posts about it in the Acrobat forum. See Computer configuration has changed
The catch is now all Adobe products require activation the probability of something going wrong has increased – and as I have the Creative Suite Premium they are all installed from the CS2 installer. You can selectively remove or add individual apps but it is a case of everybody happy or nobodies happy. One app requesting re-activation effectively causes all the apps to be de-activated.
I have uninstalled Acrobat 7 and gone back to 6 (from CS1) Acrobat is not key to me 6 does all I need, I went for the premium suite because it has GoLive. My main apps are PS Illustrator GoLive InDesign with Acrobat being a useful utility.
I dont have time to spend too long uninstalling reinstalling juts to get Acrobat 7 going (one suggestion was to reinstall Windows and only CS2
with the flaky state of the activation Im not prepared to do that! Just very annoyed that I can not use something I paid a lot of money for to its full extent.
Can I jump in and ask a question that may or may not be ridiculous? We all know that a ‘crack’ will soon come out to enable CS2. If a fully registered legal owner uses one of these cracks to stop all the hassle of reactivation issues on their own fully paid for and legal copy, what is the downside of doing this?
The downside is that you have no idea of what else it’s doing to the program (or anything else on your machine, for that matter). You’d also be violating the EULA.
Bob
Hi Mick
I don’t have the time to waste on complaining to people who don’t listen. Besides, I bet you that they have someone monitoring everything we’re writing here. After all, this forum is provided by Adobe. Try writing something absolutely disgustingly foul and see if they let your message go (or remain) online. THAT is how you’ll know they are listening.
Regards
Neil
"They" might or might not be, but I can assure that the forum hosts will be. Anything offensive will be deleted.
Bob
Hi Dave
Perhaps you would enlighten me on the VisiCalc thing. I’ve googled VisiCalc and I see that it was an old spreadsheet program. But to what are you referring with your comment? I am asking merely out of curiosity.
Regards
Neil
visicalc was THE leader in spreadsheets and an early adopter of copy protection. the fact that you’ve not heard of them tells how soundly they had their lunch handed to them by lotus 123 and later excel.
the copyright battles have happened before and it wasn’t pretty for the users before the companies realized they were doing more harm to their businesses than good.
well, fast forward 25 years and here we are again. we have a new crop of MBAs running the show and they have all these bright shiny "new" ideas.
The early versions of Lotus 1-2-3 were copy protected, too. You could only install once off of the floppy that it came on.
OT: Do you remember the days of DOS installs? MD/123 Copy a:*.* c:/123 What fun.
Bob
iirc lotus didn’t incorporate cp until after visicalc, but it was a real bear. by then, everyone started jumping on the bandwagon. even games. there were dongles and schemes to purposely defect boot disks so copies would fail if the defect wasn’t present in the exact location, etc. what bullshiete! and if an original disk failed, you were screwed.
with 123, there was a whole folder scheme that had to be set up if you wanted to run multiple copies and users would have to check out a license. every now and then the whole thing would fail and the whole company would be stranded while some poor tech (hi there!) wound up deleting and reinstalling 50-100 copies of 123 licenses to the special license folder.
same shiete different decade, imo.
Even hardware dongles are cracked. Maya what a good time I can have. Avid biento ……….!
See Dan Bricklin’s Web Site at <
http://www.bricklin.com/>
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet. You can download a copy from there, if you like (it’s about 32KB).
Lotus 1-2-3 security, the floppy one for release 1.0A, was based on a floppy disk defect, that was easily defeated. Somebody "gave" me a cracked copy, but I didn’t bother with using it, since I was using MS Multiplan. Uh, I bought Multiplan because it didn’t have copy protection.
MS Word had copy protection until version 3.0. It sold poorly until they dropped copy protection in 1986… which is when I started using MS Word. I stopped upgrading MS Word in 2000, when they reinstated copy protection. Frankly, I think it’s foolish to entrust your productivity and livelihood to the capricious whims of others; there are other choices.
Other choices? And how! Can we say GIMP?
Doing nothing at all is also a choice. As long as you can get your files into and out of the program, and its features are comfortable and sufficient, you are in a stable state–which is healthy. We can stay in that for years. Not having to be concerned about your freedom to use the things you create or purchase is also good for your health.
<
http://www.gimp.org/> makes sense if your don’t have, say, Photoshop 7 or Photoshop Elements 2 or later. It’s much like using <
http://www.openoffice.org/> as a perfectly good upgrade for MS Office when the old version becomes too outdated–there’s no reason to change before you have to, but they will be there, likely much improved, when you need them. Both are free, without legal or social or monitary or ethical or any other entanglements… which is very healthy.
Individual, who are not forced into any workflow by a business, are free to decide what’s best for themselves, without the stress others might wish to impose on them. That is so karmic, dude.
<keanu>whoa. that’s heavy!</keanu>
My CS1 suddenly after 2 or more years of daily use has just given me the message "The configuration for the activation license is missing – Please uninstall and re install this application". Using Windows 2000 p and have had no changes to my computer. There is no phone number or other information included in my notice. I do have my disks (from version 4up to 8 ) but am reluctant to use up my activations until I really need it. Does anybody know if I really have to uninstall ?
William,
As I recall, you’ll not be presented with a phone number until you reach the point in the installation of PS CS where the activation dialog is presented, at which point you can activate either by phone or directly over the internet. While I don’t think it should be necessary to uninstall, a reinstallation should clean things up and at worst should only require what is called a "repair" activation, rebuilding the one activation record for the system on which PS CS is installed and still leaving the 2nd activation for use on another system. I believe the PS CS installer will not install over an existing installation, hence the reason that an uninstall is required. When you do uninstall, you needn’t peform the Advanced Uninstall, as the purpose of that is to remove your activation records. In your case, you want to leave them intact, even if they are corrupt, so that the type of reactivation to be performed is properly detected and performed as a repair activation. Hopefully all will go smoothly and quick using the automated process over the internet. If not, and if you have to make a phone call, just be sure to follow the procedures for a "repair activation".
Hope that helps,
Daryl
I got that one time with cs. reboot fixed it.
Thanks Guys!
Reboot definitely dosn’t repair it. I have done the usual dump of preferances and at the minute it seems to be working .
If I get the notice again I will do the repair activation
Preferance dump also dos’nt repair it . Did a reinstall from the CD without deinstalling. No activation request and browser didnt open. So far the activation notice has’nt re-appeared and all of my extras in samples and actions are intact. Hope that is it .
WWK
Sorry not to get back sooner – off attending the daughter’s graduation and move, (back home – for now, of course), – but yes that was, in part, the explanation. But the service rep. was puzzled that it seemed to be the mere setting of the point than the actual restore. What I didn’t tell him and was neither asked, was, (now listed), that I have a RAID 0 array and an external HD I use for back up – which, as you can imagine, no doubt, requires ongoing back-ups etc.
This has happened twice since the first time. Silly me, I flashed my BIOS, and down it went, and just today again, after I brainlessly let Spybot S&D set a restore point on boot-up. Anyway, what I really don’t get, is why it seems to be fine if Windows just automatically sets a restore point. If I do it manually, or if I use a third party utility, then there seems to be a problem. So – Now it’s re-activation 3 "automatic points" about 3, and I might be on to controlling it. We’ll see.
Thanks and Apologies.
I am Neil Orman, who started off this enormous chain of responses. The whole thing has now got totally beyond what I needed to know, and has run off on its own. I will unsubscribe from this thread after this, but thanks for the education and the entertainment.
