At the company I work at, an employee was let go. His laptop was a company laptop with Photoshop CS3 installed on it. Photoshop was deactivated so it could be installed on another computer. The license was bought online and emailed to someone, however, that computer crashed and the email with the license is lost.

Is there a way to recover the license from the laptop? Are we better off contacting Adobe's customer support?

Hey my buddy got me a cracked version of cs3 the otherr day and I have installed it, put the serial number in but it needs an activation code put.

6 Answers

You are much better off contacting Adobe's customer support.

Belarc Advisor is an audit tool that can do this. Among other things, it will display many of the serial numbers on your computer, including Adobe products (at least CS2 for me).

Try magical jellybean, it pulls a lot of different keys.

You can, at most, delay the inevitable call to Adobe. In order to get your full rights to the software, you will almost definitely need to call at some point.

If you attempt to install and activate on a new computer, it may work as retail versions of most Adobe software allow for concurrent installations on a primary and secondary machine.

This will make your new install the secondary though and it is not clear to me if they have limits on what the secondary can do.

Moving the primary activation from one computer to another normally requires deactivation from the original install ahead of time and since you are no longer in friendly contact with the ex-employee this seems unlikely. Attempting to activate on a new machine without the deactivation will prompt a call to Adobe.

I've not got a CS3 install to test on, but previous versions of Photoshop have stored keys in the registry like so.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREAdobePhotoshop7.0Registration=SERIAL

Call customer support. Recovering the keys from the registry is not likely, and you'll find that you need an activation key anyway.

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December 19, 2006

Photoshop CS3 serial number update

[Update June 2, 2007: If you’re here because you’re trying to rip me off by somehow stealing Photoshop (via serial number, keygen, crack, etc.), you’re a thieving putz, and you’ll get no satisfaction here. May someone steal your hard work as you try to steal ours. Adios. –J.]

We continue to receive inquiries about Photoshop CS3 beta serial numbers. There are a number of issues here:

1. On Friday we discovered that a small percentage of the more than 3,000 product combinations that include Photoshop weren’t in the authentication list. Unfortunately this bit quite a few people trying to obtain CS3 serials. We fixed that issue on Friday afternoon.
2. Licensing customers have been in bit of a bind: even though they’re authorized to use a CS2 serial on multiple machines, the beta site is configured to issue serials that can be activated on only two machines. If you’re a licensing customer, please send mail to photoshopcs3beta@adobe.com so that we can follow up with you (see details below).
3. Some people are typing in the 20-digit serial number that’s visible in the CS2 About box. That makes total sense, except that the serial number is actually 24 digits long! That is, you need to get your serial number from your product materials (tips here). Again, we’re working to make this clear on the serial number acquisition page.
4. A lot of people aren’t reading the instructions on the Labs site. Many are typing their CS2 numbers into CS3, then complaining that it doesn’t work. We’re working to make the instructions harder to miss.

If you’re still having problems with serial numbers and CS3, please send mail to photoshopcs3beta@adobe.com.Important: in order to handle the process efficiently, your email needs to contain the following info (I suggest copy/paste):

• Email address in the subject line (a weird eRoom quirk, but without it we can’t reach you)
• First and last name:
• Issue statement:
• CS2 serial number (24-digits long):
• CS3 serial number (if applicable):
• Are you a CS2 single or volume license customer? (Y or N):
• If volume license, approximately how many CS2 licenses do you own?:
• Daytime phone number with area code:
• Daytime e-mail address:

Customer service says they’ll turn things around in 48-72 hours. (There’s no need to call them, as phone support is not available for the beta.)

I know that it’s frustrating to hit any delays, and we greatly appreciate your patience. We’re just four days into a huge, never-been-done-here effort, but we’re making good progress.

Thanks,
J.

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