Happily Ever After

Life in The Rural Retreat with a beautiful wife, three cats, garden wildlife, a camera, a computer – and increasing amounts about running

Earlier posts can be found on Adventures of a Lone Bass Player, where this blog began life. Recent entries can be found here.

Chatting With Adobe

by Russell Turner - 20:29 on 29 August 2017

BikerMike will have been fretting, so I’m happy to announce that my ancient Mac G4 is back in action. The secondhand replacement power unit arrived swiftly from Germany and I was able to fit it without fuss (apart from the odd screw only accessible by tiny hands – who designs these things?). But nothing’s ever straightforward.

Swapping the hard drive into another Mac and back upset the delicate flower that is Adobe CS3, which includes Photoshop and InDesign. The programs demanded that I reactivate them and refuse to work until I did so.

No problem – I have a legal copy, original disks and serial numbers. What could go wrong?

Lots. With perfect timing, a few weeks ago Adobe switched off its reactivation servers for CS3 and CS4 because the programs are too old (nine years for CS3). The telephone reactivation number was also discontinued.

A Google search led to an Adobe page that promised a simple solution: download a standalone CS3 (after producing a valid serial number) that bypassed online activation. This seemed a lot of faff (and a huge download) when Google also turned up posts from people who’d been reactivated via Adobe Chat. It was worth a try.

Nitesh (Adobe’s chat room must be somewhere in Asia) was not helpful. “CS3 is no longer supported,” he stated. “But we have a special offer on Creative Cloud – only $29.95 a month for the first year.” Things went downhill from there and after 30 minutes I gave up.

Next day I downloaded the files for the standalone CS3 disks and two hours later was faced with the instruction to deactivate the old software before installing the new version. But I couldn’t deactivate it because I couldn’t launch the program to do so until it was reactivated. A bit of a quandary.

Swati, at the Adobe chat room, began by offering me Creative Cloud (which wouldn’t run on ye olde Mac G4 anyway) but went on to prove much more helpful than his colleague, even when faced with navigating his way around the folder hierarchy of an operating system (OSX.4) that came out when he was still in nappies.

After much searching we tracked down and deleted two files and the vicious circle of deactivate to reactivate was broken. The new CS3 was installed. Photoshop and InDesign are happy again, as am I, especially as this week I’ll begin producing dummy pages for a new book – not a Bassman Book (the authors wish to publish it themselves) but one to be designed by me. The book’s stars will be mountain hares. It should be a cracker.

Chatterbox Update: The new edition is in the shops. The last sold 977. Getting back over the 1,000 is proving a challenge.

Add your comment

Your Name


Your Email (only if you are happy to have it on the site)


Your Comment - no HTML or weblinks


Enter this number in the box below and click Send - why?Unfortunately we have to do this to prevent the system being swamped by automated spam