As I was upstate in New York’s Catskills, for the long U.S. Labor Day weekend, I thought about others who move away from their homes/offices for vacations. How do they transfer activation and registration from one computer to another?
And then, when I bought a new computer at the Sony outlet up in Harriman, NY (as well as a new pair of Geox shoes and a leather blazer), I had to consider how would I transfer my activation from my little Gateway to my sleek new Vaio.
Several years ago I would have been scared at the thought of going through an activation accredidation. But after a few trials, I am much less worried.
First, some of the rules. Once you install the Creative Suite, for the first time, on a machine, you have thirty (30) days to activate it. This means that if I had wanted to download and install any of the Creative Suite trials onto my brand new Sony, I would not have had to activate it for a whole month.
This is a good thing as it is very possible that I might be in a situation where my machine had died, and I needed to demonstrate InDesign on someone else’s.
However, it does not mean I can install a trial version of InDesign on my machine if something has gone wrong with my installed version. There is a hidden file that tells the trial installer that my time with a trial version has expired. I have to reinstall from my original install disks and activate at that very moment.
Do I like this? No. I was actually stuck in a hotel room a few months back with a wonky internet connection that was unable to connect to the Adobe activation servers. Fortunately there was a 24-hour phone number that was able to generate an activation number for me.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on September 7, 2006
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