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.
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Is there a way to recover the license from the laptop? Are we better off contacting Adobe's customer support?
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.
Find Photoshop Serial Number On Computer Free
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREAdobePhotoshop7.0Registration=SERIAL
Find Adobe Photoshop Serial Number
Serial Number For Photoshop Cs3
Call customer support. Recovering the keys from the registry is not likely, and you'll find that you need an activation key anyway.