Didn't de-activate CS3 before deleting it - Now I can't use it!!
 

Hello all,

Maybe I'm an idiot, but it never occurred to me to deactivate CS3 before deleting it from my sister's laptop. Now I've installed it on my PC again and it won't let me activate it!!

I can't contact Adobe in the "Asia Pacific" region until Monday so I could just wait but am I going to encounter any problems asking them to deactivate it for me? I have the serial number, so hopefully they believe me and just do it.

Has anyone else made this mistake before?

For lack of an easy solution you could, as I'm sure you know, re-install your OS if you are in a hurry, but if you take that drastic step I think I would re-format my HD also just to make sure. Good luck, hope someone else has an easier solution for you!

If you still have access to your sister's laptop, reinstall CS3 and then run the deactivation. Unless you've had significant hardware changes that caused you to have to re-activate your editing computer, you must have another (third) activated installation of CS3 on some other computer because like most "activated" software, Adobe apps allow two activations. If so, deactivate THAT computer.

Otherwise, I think you're out of luck until Monday as I don't think that just doing an OS reinstall will give you more activations. At best, a low-level format and OS reinstall will get you to the pre-activation state...not sure if functionality is limited in CS3 prior to activation, but seem to me on CS2 it was.

Reformatting will NOT help you at all. The only way to recapture that activation is to reinstall CS3 on the laptop that is activated, and then deactivate it. It would be nice if Adobe had some separate utility to do that, but currently I believe reinstalling CS3 is the only option.

I'll try re-installing it on my sister's laptop and then de-activating.

My concern with that however is that after finishing my project and un-installing it, I did a system restore so that the laptop went back to how it was before I ever fooled around with it - so tht she could rest assured that she was getting the laptop back the exact way she gave it to me.

That might throw a spanner in the works...

As for the other "third" install, you're right - I did install it on my old computer, which I recently formatted and re-installed Windows on, so there's no way I'll be able to de-activate that one, is there??

I'm currently on hold with Adobe and have been for over half an hour and am starting to suspect that they will never answer.

This is really getting me down...

EDIT: Taken care of - someone finally answered the phone and de-activated the previous installations and I can start afresh. That was a silly misstake to make. I will not be doing it again!