Can’t activate Creative Suite 6

Here's a guaranteed way to activate CS6. You'll have no problems at all.

(The trick is you have to generate TWO codes to do this. Most folks don't know this.)

The very confusing and convoluted Adobe "instructions" to do this are a real mess. It's no wonder lots of people are having problems activating/re-activating CS6. You can't activate online any longer because Adobe stopped supporting this a long time ago. But you can activate offline if you know how. Of course Adobe makes it hard on purpose to do all this because they don't want people to use CS6 because they want all of us to "rent" photoshop etc. for the rest of our lives. Well I refused to do that.

So here's what I did:

I bought a second small 500GB external hard drive (you can also do this by partitioning your main hard drive if you don't want a second drive) and I installed an older version of the Mac OS on it. One where CS6 runs smoothly with no problems like in the old days. In my case, that was OS 10.9 Mavericks that I installed. My main larger internal computer runs one of the lastest Mac OS.

So now I have the best of both worlds. Most of the time I'm on the main internal drive, reaping the benefits of all the new Mac features. And when I need to use Photoshop, or Illustrator etc., I just switch to the other hard drive that I named simply "Hard-Drive-Photoshop."

But here's the problem. Even doing that, it's still hard to figure out "how to activate" CS6 once it's installed. You want to get it out of the "trail" mode. I read about all the frustration all over the internet on this. So I created a short 5 minute video expalning step-by-step how to activate CS6. I have a background of teaching at the university level. So it's second nature to me explaining stuff like this.

Anyone interested, here's the video, which I posted on my You/tube account.

https://youtu.be/4lZfnIVT3p0

Regards,

Don King

Art Director

Thank you for replying. I'm trying to do offline activation as irs an old Mac and I can't get it to connect to internet. I keep putting in the computer generated code and serial number and it keeps telling me one of them is incorrect. I thought if I moved the hard drive into the new one it would work 🙁

Let me move this the the Accounts, Payments, & Plans forum, which is the appropriate one for your question. The Using the Community forum is for questions about how to use the community.

As far as I know (and I've been on vacation for a couple weeks), the activation servers for CS6 are still alive. Make sure you have TL1.2 enabled on your machine, some of the Adobe servers won't allow connections without it now.