My desktop machine, a dual G5 tower, died (motherboard failed). A good time to finally upgrade to a Mac Pro, but now I’m having a problem re-activating my copy of Photoshop CS3 on this new machine. Since I could not de-activate on the dead machine, how do I free up an activation? (the other activation is for my laptop).
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Assuming that your laptop is PPC based, you might try slapping your tower’s hard drive in a firewire disk enclosure and boot your laptop from that. Then deactivate.
If you explain your situation to Adobe, they should be able to make an exception and reset your activation.
My laptop is Intel-based, so no go there (good idea though).
I did take the drive from my dead machine and slap it into the new desktop machine, and did the whole transfer thing, but that wasn’t enough from an Activation point of view, unfortunately.
My first choice would be the easiest and quickest: call Adobe and explain. I’ve had success this way with at least one computer that was just zeroed out and dumped. I mean, what happens if the machine is destroyed (flood, fire, electrical storm, dropping to the floor, etc)? You may have to show proof of purchase.
As long as you’re polite and ask nice they’ll go out of their way to help. I’ve called twice. The first time I started a lengthy explanation that was actually cut short, as in "no need for all that".
Essentially, the hackers rip out things like Bridge and Shared Components, etc., in order to produce a "portable" cracked copy of Photoshop that fits into a folder of some 60-70MB and can be used from a removable drive like a USB flash drive or a CD-ROM.
Could Activation now be tied to both a particular HD AND a particular computer?
I don’t know on a Mac, and I don’t know if Adobe does it anyway, but that certainly is possible on a Windoze machine. My understanding is that it (the software security) reads and records some of the system config data when first initializing, and if it doesn’t match up later. . .
I recently got to spend half a day on the phone with tech support for some of our software after we added a BlueRay drive to a machine. It turned out it WASN’T any sort of driver or software conflict, just the fact that it was there. They had to send me a reactivtion code (Windoze is SO fun!).
people could just install it on a FWD and use it on any computer
How would that be an issue? You are still using your license on one computer at a time.
RE: #16… I doubt that there are any cracked copies of CS on the internet. Adobe makes versions of its software that do not require activation (site licenses). These are typically what get shared online and sold on eBay as they do not require any cracking to work. Adobe has already cracked the software for the pirates while many of the rest of us paying customers deal with activation nonsense. 🙂
