Anyone visiting Adobe’s website for the next five weeks or so looking for product demos is going to be greeted with a one sentence statement:
Product trials are unavailable until July 1. We apologize for any inconvenience. For additional details, please refer to the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
The reason according the referenced FAQ is a bug that causes the 30 day trial period to expire after only one day if the product is launched for the first time in the month of June. More alarming is the fact that this bug will also cause purchased products that have been installed and launched but not activated to expire in the same one day.
Given the fact that once a demo has been run on a machine, there’s no way to run it again (short of a low level harddrive format) it seems like a good idea to pull the trials off the website. But, a full read of those FAQs leads to a Tech Note article shows that not only is there a fix for this problem, that fix actually extends the trial period to 65 days.
So, if you’ve already downloaded the demo but haven’t installed or launched it yet, you might want to wait until June to do so. You’ll need to jump through a few hoops, but you’ll get more than double the usual time to test drive it. If you haven’t done so, unless the powers that be at Adobe change their minds, I’m afraid you’re out of luck until July.
If you purchase the product and launch it in June for the first time and for some reason won’t be able to activate it immediately make sure to download the appropriate patch for either Windows or Mac.
The aforementioned Tech Note has all the instructions for running it.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on May 28, 2008
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