Help! I’ve Lost My Serial Number.
Every now and again, I’ll spot a post on the User to User Forum from someone who’s misplaced the cases that his/her software came in and now want to install on a new machine or just got a laptop for travel and wants to take advantage of the two allowed concurrent activations.
As long as the software is available, installing is easy, but activating it without a serial number isn’t going to happen.
Before I get into a little trick to find the serial number on a machine that’s already running allow me to step up on soapbox and point out that the best way to avoid problems is to register your software online IMMEDIATELY after installing. You’ll need a free account with Adobe but this will assure you of access at any time to your records.
If you didn’t do that, here’s a little trick originally posted by forum contributor Peter Spier to use when you’re in a pinch. Just deactivate the software. You’ll find the deactivate command under the help menu. (note: it may take a minute or two to become available) When you begin the deactivation process you’ll get a window that will contain a check box to remove your serial number. DON’T CHECK IT.
Once you deactivate, the application will automatically close. Upon relaunching, you’ll be greeted with the activation wizard with your full serial number already filled in.
And to repeat my earlier advice, once you have this taken care of please register your software with Adobe. You’ve invested a lot of money in it and registering the product is the best way to protect that investment.
One final note, this will use up one of your twenty activation/deactivation choices which I wrote about here.
Bob is absolutely right that you should register your product with Adobe. You can go to the Adobe website to see your registration number.
The problem is if you have MULTIPLE licenses. It doesn’t tell you which serial number is installed on which computer. (Of course, the highly organized will keep a list matching serial numbers and workstations, but most of us….)
That’s where Peter’s excellent tip comes in handy!
I’m flattered.
And as far as using up the activations, I’ve done that, once, or something similar with a hard drive crash, and I called the phone number that’s also available in the dialog. The person on the other end was very nice, asked why I needed to reset the activations, and got me back in business in about three minutes. Honest folks have nothing to fear from activation.
Steve, for the multiple licenses you can retrieve a partial serial to determine which license is used on which workstation if you have the Suite. This trick doesn’t work for stand alone InDesign
1) Launch Illustrator or Photoshop CS3 application.
2) Go to Help > System Info
3) Scroll down to Serial Number, it will be after the OS and User Name entries.
4) This line has the first 20 digits of the serial used to install the suite.
Years ago I created a simple little FileMaker database with three fields — Software Name and Serial Number and Date. I enter every new application I install, and it has saved my life many times as I have moved to new computers. And, of course, there are lots of inexpensive programs that do the same thing.
I tend to list the software name, version and serial number in my address book. Always accessible, like a phone number as well as being synced and backed up regularly.
I had the problem of not having my CS3 serial handy when I wanted to install the Fireworks CS4 Beta at home, and was sure the serial shown in Illustrator and Photoshop’s System Info dialog was correct.
When I got onto Adobe’s live help chat thingamajig the person I got ‘help’ from didn’t tell me it wasn’t the complete serial but did know it wasn’t valid (duh!) so I still had to drive to work to pick up the serial.
I thought about deactivating and re-activating, but decided not to as I didn’t need the serial right away.
Saving the serials in one location is a good idea. I think I’ll use Google Docs for that as then it’s available everywhere I need it, in case I need the info at home while the software’s at work or vice versa. It’d also help save the info on whose name it’s registered to (I tend to register or order on multiple addresses).
Thank you for the help!
Thank you! This is exactly the info I needed! We have a number of legitimate copies of CS3 and they’re just on the wrong computers but we’ve lost the original boxes. Thanks again.