Activation on Vacation

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.