I usually tell people we’re a Linux shop – but no rule without exception: We actually have two “Microsoft Windows”-driven PCs, and one of those two is used for a bunch of Adobe tools.
As part of a hardware upgrade, we decided to completely reinstall the software on that machine… it had been running fine for years, but especially the disk drive was getting old and started to make some noise. (Installing Windows XP on an SATA machine is worth its own blog entry. OTOH, there are plenty of sites describing both cause and solution, I’ll probably skip that.)
In the end, after dusting off our “Adobe CS3 Master Collection” media and some hours of time, installing CS3 wasn’t much of a hassle. Which simply means that we seem to know our way around the stones and pebbles that are in the way. But this time, something new popped up afterwards: Running the post-installation updater cycle would only lead to some error messages rather than install latest code levels.
Searching the net provided the solution, again. It did take some time to find it, but others indeed had run into this as well: The Adobe CS3 software is a bit “oldish” now and the certificates included with the updater application have expired. The work-around is simple, just turn back the system time to some pre-expiration value (any date before October 17 2011 will do) and there’s even a knowledge base article available from Adobe. But what I will simply not understand: Why does Adobe have to be so user-unfriendly as not to provide a patch for the updater, installing new certificates? After all, customers have spent a serious 4-digit amount of money to buy that software, so I expect to be able to install and update it not only two years after purchase, but for as long as I can come up with a base system meeting all technical requirements! Especially since the various updates are still online at Adobe, it’s just the updater that cannot verify the signatures.
The only way to top this would be to turn off the license key servers. And from what I’ve learned about Adobe and their user-friendlyness in the past years, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d do exactly that. Just to force people into buying the latest CSx levels.
I wish we had some (Linux) tool chains that would do the job… ’til then, we’ll have to stick with Adobe 🙁