This got me thinking about what other vendors do. Just one sample, but this activation system business clearly seemed useless. None found it difficult to get whatever pirated copies they had. The answers varied in their exact words, but they were basically all the same in saying that for their limited uses, and for the purposes of learning either they thought it was too expensive or they just couldn’t afford it. I then asked my students, in an anonymous fashion, how many have legitimate copies (about 50%) and why they saw fit to steal the software. I was sort of stunned that he would so brazenly admit to being a pirate, but also that he wasn’t deterred or shamed in any way. After giving my $.02 on what folders to copy, and so forth I reminded him about the deactivation/reactivation process to which he replied “Don’t worry bro, don’t need to activate, got a crack”.
I teach a photoshop class and had a student seek advice about how to move all the related photoshop brushes, plug-ins, etc. Not only is a royal pain for legitimate, paying customers in many situations, from what I’ve observed in the real world, it’s completely ineffective. It’s mind-boggling to me that Adobe is still sticking with its draconian activation system. So, if you’re among those juggling more than two machines with one license please keep careful tabs on that count. Should you get bitten by this you can call Adobe and get 5 more activations but that’s not always practical. The last thing you want to do is deactivate your office machine and find out that you’ve hit that limit when you get to a client’s office when trying to activate your laptop. The fact that it’s taken a year to be exposed tells me that there’s not all that many people testing the limit of the system, but it’s still important for users to be aware that it exists. It’s recently come to light though various topics in the User to User forums that the CS3 activation system, while still allowing for deactivation, has a hard limit of 20 activation/deactivation cycles. With this system Adobe hoped to control “casual piracy” and still allow honest users to easily move their activations between machines while still stopping multi seat users from buying one license and installing it on multiple machines.
That person could install the software on all three machines and simply deactivate one of the office machine and activate the laptop. This was a boon to anyone with two offices and a laptop. A few clicks and the software was deactivated on one machine and this allowed for activation on another. To accommodate users in that catagory when CS2 was released, it contained a transfer activation feature. One of the major concerns users had was the legitimate use of more than two machines. It’s important note that this is with the provision that both machines are used by the same user and never at the same time. With Adobe’s activation system, the user is permitted two activations in order to allow the use of work machine and home machine or even a laptop. They control how many computers on which you can run the software. While each company has its own system they all do pretty much the same thing. CC 2014 is quite good.By now everyone’s familiar with software activation so I’m not going to go into the explanations for it. If you ever installs CS6 make sure you install all the CS6 updates.
506 core issues were fix with that update only then could I use CS6. It took Adobe ever 5 months to release an update for CS6 that addressed the major issues. CS6 IMO was the buggiest version ever released. CS3 was one of the best version Adobe released, CS4 had GPU support added I never installed it. They have too many issues IMO the should not ne you default Photoshop application. I only use newer version of Photoshop to test other users problems. I had no problem and also did not have the problem gener7 had, CC 2014 is still the default version of Photoshop one my machine. I then downloaded the CS3 Update patch and ACR 4.6 for CS3 and installed the patch and ACR 4.6. That would not be normal for the no longer exist.
I installed CS3 with the serial after entering that numbers there was a messaged about the activation server could not be connected to.
Downloaded the new CS3 install and noted the serial number provided for me.
I used the new CS3 link entered my CS3 serial followed the instructions. I had CS2, CS6 Subscription version 13.1.2, CC, CC 2014, CC 2015, CC 2015.5 and CC 2017 installed and all up to date.