Photoshop :: Number Of Activations

Just a little info for those who don't already know this.

Needing to reinstall Vista to change the boot drive, I started to deactivate PS and the Design Standard suite upgrade. The latter went fine, but PS flat out refused to deactivate - it talked to the server and came back with the same answer every time: "Deactivation unsuccessful".

So I called Adobe (Norway) and a very nice and helpful gentleman confirmed my suspicion: I had used up my 20 allowed activations (I'd just recently seen this mentioned here and on the Creative Suite forums).

But he also told me to just go ahead and do whatever I needed to do, and call him later to get a new activation code. This I did with no problems.

Anyway, it might be a good idea to not "waste" deactivations unless you really have to. Even though the whole process was very painless, they *do* keep business hours 9 - 5 and no weekends (at least here - don't know about the rest of the world).

How did I manage to use up 20 activations in just one year? Well, I'm one of those unfortunate souls who just can't keep my fingers off my computer. I'm always looking for little improvements, and with a high-end laptop fully backed up there's no risk of losing work or uptime. But I remember having quite a few problems getting Vista 64 to install properly with the DIMM's fully populated, and I guess I blew 5 activations in one day there.