/* Begin Insomnia Induced Rant */
OK, so I spoke a little too soon. The big computer isn’t completely dead. I will not be able to use Motion until I can get a replacement video card. That’s not as bad as trying to come up with $4500. I was able to dig up the old 64mb video card and so far so good.
During the process of figuring out what the hell was going wrong, I somehow corrupted the direcotry information on the boot volume. I let DiskWarrior work on it for about 30 hours. In that time it found 4, count ’em, 4 overlapped files. I’m glad I stopped there because I realized the problem was the broken fan on the Radeon’s heatsink.
OK, so after replacing the card, I re-installed the ATA133 controller PCI card, loaded the boot volume in an enclosure, put it on Tam’s iMac and put TechToolPro 4 on it. TechTool wasn’t able to fix the problems, but it was able to get it to mount. So, I then started copying stuff over the network. Thank goodness for Cat-5e and a Gigabit switch!! I have held on to most of the install disks and have a serial number program that I mostly keep up to date. I’m only installing the essential things while I’m limping. As you might imagine, Photoshop is probably the most important.
So, I copy Photoshop over, including every file I can find in the Volume Library and the Home Directory Library. I repair permissions, restart and launch PhotoShop. Uh oh. There’s a problem with a missing file in the Application Support folder (never mind that I used ditto). OK, so I guess I need to reinstall Photoshop. I bought it as a download, and Adobe’s still working on integrating the Adobe store and the Macromedia Store; time to sit on hold.
51 minutes of Kenny G later, I’m talking to someone. They help me to the download area but warn me that if I don’t have the serial number from the original installation (my version of CS2 was an upgrade from version 7 Educational), the installer will crap out. There is no way for him to find the older version. Here’s what I found out and he didn’t tell me.
Should this happen to you (I’m going to assume that you’ve paid for your original version and the serial number is legit) go here:
<Macintosh HD>/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Adobe\ Registration\ Database
Open this in your favorite text editor and you’ll see something like the following:
[Illustrator 10.0] SERIAL=1XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX [Photoshop 7.0] SERIAL=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX [Photoshop 8.0] PRODREG=ADBE SERIAL=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX [User] COMPAN=bitterballerina.com COMPANY_UTF8=bitterballerina.com NAME=Benjamin Westafer NAME_UTF8=Benjamin Westafer [Adobe Reader 7.0] EPIC_EULA_DATE=-1108471076l EPIC_EULA_LANG=0 EPIC_EULA_AGREED=accept EPIC_VERSION=7.0.0 EPIC_APP=Adobe Reader 7.0
You didn’t think I’d show the numbers!
So, either this tech support guy didn’t know about this or believed I was full of shit and had a pirated original version and he wouldn’t be authorized to give out this information. So, there you go. I suspect Adobe will team up with M$ to make you submit a cotton swab before you can be granted a license.
Don’t misunderstand, I realize that Adobe and any other software vendor has a right to protect themselves from pirates. Still, it sucks that these guys can’t find a way for you to communicate with them without there being this implicit lack of trust. I really think it has to do with Software vendors having no appreciation of how much software costs. In general, I think we American’s don’t understand the price of things. At any rate, $699.99 is a lot of money to me. If I spend this amount to purchase your software, I expect you to assume that I’m legitimate and help me get up and running; instead of give me a bullshit story about how I’ll need to find the original box or buy a new version.
I hope someone who needs that one file finds it here. Again, I do not advocate stealing software. Indeed, lately I’ve been on a Linux kick where this kind of crap simply doesn’t exist. (There’s worlds of other crap, but you always learn something useful…)
/* End Insomnia Induced Rant */