Adobe put me out of business today – old activation issue

[Tero Ahlfors]

You’re using pretty old hardware and software that the manufacturers/developers do not support anymore. Getting new software won’t help because they need new hardware. You can get pretty powerful computers for way cheaper then you could back in the day, but if you need to stay with the older stuff then there’s probably no legal way to get that version working.

[Al Bergstein]

I wonder if there’s anybody selling a similar setup on Ebay? Or at least a version of the software that might come with an activation code already in it? Unlikely but I’d search for it.

This is really an ongoing problem for all of us. I’m a small businessman myself, so understand your concerns. But putting your business in a place where you rely on out of date and not supported software (think FCP 7 as something far more widespread), leaves you vulnerable to someone somewhere. There are thousands of people using FCP7 still that are only one OS upgrade away from losing it’s functioning ability.

My mother in law wrote an entire series of boating books in the 1990s on software that Adobe obsoleted (Framemaker). By the time I was given the hard drives with the book in 2006 there was no way to upgrade and save the formatted material for future revisions or publication, even on the newer versions of Framemaker! End of the road and the only way forward would have been to rewrite her books on a new package. It wasn’t worth that much to her or me. That decision was likely made by a 30 something Program Manager at Adobe, based on the fact that people were no longer updating from that old version (they likely already had), the Framemaker code was likely really bad from a modern perspective and the cost to Adobe to put a PM, developer, test and marketing team together to push something with such a limited group of users that didn’t make them enough money to recoup costs. That they couldn’t even provide a conversion program to get the formatted book into the newer software really pissed me off. I swore I would never use FrameMaker again, and haven’t.

By not upgrading over the years, you likely helped them make the same decision, to eliminate the activation server. Not sure why they can’t just give you another number that would work, but perhaps there is a technical issue with it (or no one in Adobe even knows anything about how the server worked, or what numbers could be valid choices). But to be clear,your old numbers no longer work (that assumes you saved what numbers were generated back then)?

Good luck on getting it running again. Wish you all the best.

Al

[Rich Brown]

Thanks Al,
What really pisses me off is their scheme to make me reactivate the software any time I make any repairs to my computer. I have had to reactivate this system several times over the years, with just a phone call.
It seems with a little effort they could code a patch to bypass this reactivation – It’s not like many are looking to pirate a 2004 editing program anymore. At the very least they should give me a new copy of Premiere to offset the thousands of dollars this will cost me to get back in business.

WFORich
Cincinnati, OH
WORKSHOP 2.0 XP Pro

[Al Bergstein]

Yes, the reactivation is a PITA. And it would seem to make sense to be able to code around it, but even that becomes a project that requires a look at cost benefit analysis etc. . Seriously, there may be no one left at Adobe that even knows the code to that original activation scheme. These one off requests rarely find traction inside these large corporations, unless you know someone on the inside. I don’t even know if Adobe monitor this forum anymore.

Best of luck on this! There should be someone out on Ebay that has a copy of it. And that is, if you can get it activated!

Al

[Tero Ahlfors]

[Rich Brown] “It seems with a little effort they could code a patch to bypass this reactivation”

If it were a one man small software company then probably yes. Setting up a authentication server/coding a patch for a 12 year old program… Probably no. They are software developers after all. They want people to upgrade so they get paid and they can develop their software forward.

[Rich Brown] “At the very least they should give me a new copy of Premiere to offset the thousands of dollars this will cost me to get back in business.”

It sucks but Adobe isn’t responsible for personal hardware failures.

[Dave Brandt]

PM me, I may be able to help

http://www.BrandtStudios.ie

Macbook Pro Retina 15″ i7 2.7 16GB Early 2013
PC i7 32GB Self Build
FCPX LogicX Adobe CC Vegas 12 Nuendo 4

[Rich Brown]

Just sent you an email to the info@ address on that site – Thanks

WFORich
Cincinnati, OH
WORKSHOP 2.0 XP Pro

[Rich Brown]

In a great example of the power of this forum, a fellow Premiere user in Ireland gave me some ideas for a workaround. He logged 12 emails to me to try and help me through this problem. In the end, I was able to uninstall Premiere Pro 1.5 and reinstall it (with no help from Adobe) and I can at least open my projects and save them for export, saving the 100+ hours of work invested. CreativeCow is the best!

WFORich
Cincinnati, OH
WORKSHOP 2.0 XP Pro

[Gary Huff]

[Rich Brown] “In the end, I was able to uninstall Premiere Pro 1.5 and reinstall it (with no help from Adobe)”

I am glad you got it working again, but seriously, the sense of entitlement is astounding for software you bought in 2004. No one else does this either. You think Apple is going to give you any help at all for Final Cut Pro 4.5? Or Sony for Vegas 4.0? Even Microsoft discontinued support for Windows XP. You should seriously tone-down that attitude.

[Tom Laughlin]

I’m not positive on this, but there maybe some forums with workarounds, or even an Adobe patch that might fix the problem? I’ve also heard that Adobe can and has set up a special software exceptions with certain vendors, who are running locked and offline versions of Premiere. I’m still uncertain how they’re doing it, but Premiere 8.1 is booting up, and working, and I’m not connected to the cloud at all. The other day, at home, Adobe ran me into an issue for where could no longer open projects in Premiere 9.2, they wanted me to run a permissions update, in order for me to open my proejcts, instead of seeing an error saying “this project contains a sequence or codec with no data”, so I ran the permissions update, which was really a Premiere Pro app update in disguise, then, after the permissions update ran, I realized what had just then happened, the latest version of Premiere was on my machine, but my previous versions of Premiere: v6.0, v7.2, and v 9.2 were gone! I was left with opening up my projects in the latest version of Premiere, v10.4, and thank heavens, it all opened right up, and everything was all there as if nothing happened. It’s very frustrating that various problems like this and others are occurring, and many of them are inconsistent across computers and software versions. There are days I wish we could run software like we did with FCP7, no cloud connection or no cloud at all.

hope you find your solution.

Tom Laughlin
Producer/Editor
Salt Lake City, Utah
digitalchophouse.com