So I'm in a bit of a pickle....

I have Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium software that I purchased back in my college days (2012). The version is CS5 and, of course, I've had it on a few devices over the years. In the past, I've never had a problem with deactivating it from an old device so I can activate it on a new device. That is until recently.

I purchased a new laptop and went through the necessary steps of deactivating my Adobe software on my old laptop (Help > Deactivate). It shows on my old laptop that the software has been deactivated ("deactivate" is now greyed out in the drop down menu), but on my new laptop it continued to warn me that I needed to deactivate it on my other device. Now it will no longer let me access my product, which was working up until that point. I get a pop-up window that says "activation limit reached". It does give me the option to retry my activation if I've already deactivated on my old laptop, which I've tried clicking on that but it just keeps sending me in a circle saying that my product is still active on old devices and blah, blah, blah.

So today I got into contact with an Adobe agent via chat. I even let the agent access my laptop remotely to take a look and all that jazz. All he really does is go through the same process that I already tried, only to tell me that my product has reached the end of its life and then, of course, suggests that I do the subscription, which I politely declined. I told the agent more than once that I'd already deactivated my product on the other device but it's not resetting the count. The agent also said that the product may not work on my new device since it's an older product, but that's not the case because it was working fine during its "trial" phase when I first downloaded it.

Anyway, I've been reading up on other people experiencing similar issues within the Adobe Community. A few people acted like you have to be very persistent when speaking to the agent, specifically tell them at the start of the conversation that you want an activation count reset, find someone who knows what they're doing, and that it is possible for the activation count to be reset on some older products. While others say that it can't be done because of the discontinuation of older servers, etc. etc. etc.

My question is, should I put forth the effort of contacting Adobe Support again because resetting the count for my older product is possible and this agent was just trying to push me towards a subscription? Or is it actually true that nothing can be done and my product is officially dead in the water? I'm a very stubborn individual, so I'm more than willing to put in the leg work if it means getting my product back up and running again lol.

Thanks in advance for any and all help!