I had this really frustrating problem recently, when moving my Adobe Acrobat X installation from my old computer to a new computer. Clever as I was, I’d thought I’d deactivate my installation on the old computer, and then activate it on the new computer. Since it was about a year since the last time I did anything like this, I googled it, and quite promptly came up with the Adobe site, where they tell you to go to “Help>Deactivate”. Problem is, I didn’t have this option in that menu, so I googled that as well, and all I came up with was that for some people it appears when they open a document.
Well, of course this didn’t work for me, so I contacted Adobe for a solution.

As it turns out, if you have a Volume License Key (VLK), instead of a Retail key, the deactivate option will not be visible, due to the simple fact that it doesn’t need to be deactivated. This might sound strange for people not familiar with volume licenses, and it didn’t dawn on me either even though I have quite a lot of experience of VLKs. The idea is, that instead of buying a retail package and keep deactivating and activating it when your users get new computers, you simply just install it on the new one and it works. Another benefit is that the VLK serial is the same for all the licenses in the same order, so you don’t have to keep track of hundreds of serials. Therefore, you buy enough licenses for all your users, and then just move the installations with your users. No need to deactivate them! And Adobe takes it on “good faith” that you have enough licenses for all your installations.

Well, that it, thought I’d put this out there so other people might get the whole answer when googling instead of having to piece it together from multiple sources as I had to.

Categories: Tech