Let me just start by saying I LOVE Adobe CS3. On my Mac Book Pro it is a HUGE jump in performance and many of the features are incredible in all of the applications. That, said, the install and licensing of Adobe CS3 are best described as stupid.
My laptop is provided by my employer and is my primary work machine and work purchased the Adobe CS3 licensing to install on it. We purchased the Concurrent Win/Mac License with the understanding that I would be able to install it on both my OS X partition and my Windows partition. It was only $60 more (educational bulk licensing now mind you) so I figured might as well. It all seemed very obvious by the licensing that Windows running on a Mac was one of the things this license was built for. Well, after nearly a month of fighting, I finally found out that yep that works. The problem is there is not one Key for both of the installs so you have to get a Mac key and a Windows key for installing it on both your partitions, as allowed by the license. Sounds easy, but I couldn’t get Adobe to part with the two different keys. This probably would have been easier if it was a “box” purchase but because I was dealing with corporate licensing it took an extra month to get it setup. Unacceptable.
The reason I found out that I needed a different key was I had previously installed CS3 on my Windows partition and I couldn’t get it authenticated. This is a bit frustrating for two reasons: One, it took nearly an hour and something like 3GB to install it and two, once it was installed it broke my PDF writer. Even after uninstalling it was still broke. After getting my new key, I decided to do a “quick” (remember that word) install to make sure it works and in the process fix my now broken Windows PDF writer. So, during the install process I deselected all of the check boxes in CS3 except for PDF and clicked install. Big Suprise. The install for JUST ADOBE PDF was about 2GB and took nearly an hour! OUCH. No problem though, now I have a fixed PDF writer and I can test out the new key I thought. WRONG and WRONG. When I launched Adobe PDF CS3 it gave an error that you must first launch one of the other applications to initiate the program. WHAT! Yes, thats right, after all of that time and 2GB of application installed I had installed one non functioning program and there was NO way to put in my key and activate it. Oh Joy.
The good news is I was able to uninstall PDF and then reinstall the entire CS3 suite and my new key worked just fine. The whole experience left me with a ton of wasted time and a serious bad feeling about what Adobe just put me through to use their program.
The moral of this sad, sad story:
- The Win/Mac CS3 Concurrent License DOES allow you to install it on the Windows and Mac partitions of the same computer.
- You will need two different keys, one for Windows and one for Mac to install them both for your concurrent license.
- DON’T install just Adobe PDF from the CS3 suite. It won’t work.
- CS3 is an awesome suite of applications but its install seems very bloated and takes quite a while.
Technorati Tags: Adobe, CS3, Concurrent License
