Without all of the details, think of it like this: you get two activations. You have now used them both. Deactivating the old machine preserves one of your activations.
There are a lot of wherefore’s and forthwith’s, but in essence, if it were me, and I was decomissioning the old pc, yeah, I’d transfer the activation so as to preserve my next installation (if necessary).
As Tony says, but it’s worth noting that the activation counter does reset from time to time to allow for crashing harddrives, etc.
I’ve activated on a third machine before remembering to deactivate an old machine that I wasn’t going to use anymore.
Bob
When my old PC crashed, which I had CS2 installed on from its first release I phoned Adobe Customer Support to explain the situation. I asked them to reset my counter as I would be installing CS2 on my new PC over a weekend (telephone support would not be available then) and I had used my second activation on my laptop when the CS rep checked he said I had several activations left so the counter must reset over time. It activated without any problems.
