12-09-2008, 02:50 PM
I hate the Adobe activation scheme. I've even managed to 'break' it in the sense that it no longer worked and I could not run CS3
It was last winter when I upgraded from a G5 to a MacPro running Tiger. Early summer I upgraded Tiger to Leopard and that's when the trouble began. For about a month I maintained 4 partitions (Tiger boot/backup and Leopard boot/backup). I was always careful to deactivate CS3 on all boot partitions before cloning thier backup. After the clone process I would boot from the clone to verify it was a good clone, Launch CS, activate then deactivate before returning to the regular boot partition.
One day I started getting messages that I could no longer deactivate CS3, note the error code and call Adobe techsupport. Turns out that Adobe keeps a count of your activations and deactivations. I got bumped up through the tech support chain of command until I reached a software engineer who said that the programers put no limit on the number of activations, but for some reason had written in a limit of 21 for deactivations! He didn't know why they did that, but the fix was for Adobe to reset my 'count' numbers. In that process their 'fix' process had a limit of 5 so I was told that I could only deactivate 5 more times. After that, I'd have to buy a new copy of CS3!!!! That's BS!!
It was last winter when I upgraded from a G5 to a MacPro running Tiger. Early summer I upgraded Tiger to Leopard and that's when the trouble began. For about a month I maintained 4 partitions (Tiger boot/backup and Leopard boot/backup). I was always careful to deactivate CS3 on all boot partitions before cloning thier backup. After the clone process I would boot from the clone to verify it was a good clone, Launch CS, activate then deactivate before returning to the regular boot partition.
One day I started getting messages that I could no longer deactivate CS3, note the error code and call Adobe techsupport. Turns out that Adobe keeps a count of your activations and deactivations. I got bumped up through the tech support chain of command until I reached a software engineer who said that the programers put no limit on the number of activations, but for some reason had written in a limit of 21 for deactivations! He didn't know why they did that, but the fix was for Adobe to reset my 'count' numbers. In that process their 'fix' process had a limit of 5 so I was told that I could only deactivate 5 more times. After that, I'd have to buy a new copy of CS3!!!! That's BS!!