How to install (most of) CS6 on Windows 11 without errors

Nancy,

As an electrical engineer who has also written hundreds of thousands of lines of code over the past 40ish years, I say this respectfully...  you should stick to your area of expertise when giving advice.  Software development is clearly not your forte. 

By @Brandon_Tarr

@Nancy OShea is correct. You can't expect a company to support all software versions indefinitely, especially if the system has been modified independantly from the software producer. 

Let me say that we are quite on a similar educational level. I'm a microelectronics engineer, I started my career by designing custom chips, designing PCB boards and debugging low level OS programs. During my career, I acquired some very expensive software, costing a multiple of what Photoshop did cost, both, on lease and on buy options. None of those software packages (at the then most recent version level) would run on modern computers today. 

Simply updating and testing the software to make it run on modern computers would cost a fortune, for all available versions of Photoshop, or any other old software. 

Software and systems engineers worth their salt understand that it is an expectation of customers that the software they purchased works on newer systems. 

By @Brandon_Tarr

There is no reason why it should not work under a newer Windows OS, if Microsoft did not change a vital part of their system. Installation, however is quite different. I would suggest to downgrade your system to Windows 7, install C6 and upgrade to a current OS. You will have a running CS6 system. (nb: The last time I started Photoshop CS5 on an older machine of mine under Windows 10, it did still start.)

I'm not sure where you conjured up the idea that software's expected shelf-life is 3-5 years? The Linux core utility "ls" was used as early as 1971 and it is still used every single day by literally millions of people around the world. Microsoft even made it available in Windows using the WSL. Someone should have told this 54 year old software that the place for legacyware is in the Recycle Bin!

 

By @Brandon_Tarr

You do not run the original "ls" binary from the PDP-7, are you? I would guess, without knowing for real, however, that Photoshop CS6 is a bit more complex then the original ls program under UNIX. (BTW: it's originally a UNIX program, not LINUX! Linus wasn't probably writing code at the time of the UNIX release.)

The new "perpetual update" & subscription paradigms that contemporary software developers are attempting to force feed to the world are both unnecessary and unwelcome. They are nothing more than software developers attempts to boost revenue for features that most end users don't value. Old experienced software developers know that new "features" also introduce new bugs. The vast majority of software users prefer less bugs and increased performance to shiny new features.

By @Brandon_Tarr

What strikes me is, if that is true, why users are not running the CP/M OS instead of Windows 11? I did run CP/M and used Wordstar as a text processor, but I prefer Windows 11 to older systems, and Microsoft Word to Wordstar. 

No the vast majority of professionals prefer using modern software, increasing their productivity. You may not love software subscriptions, but they are the new reality with many companies, providing software for the professionals. As a professional user, I always needed to upgrade to the latest software version, to be able to exchange data with other professional users, and I needed to keep older versions on my system, because not all customers did upgrade at my pace. With the software subscription, I'm quite sure that most of my customers and peers are using the same software level, and that is a huge advantage. As for the price of the subscription, at the time when it got introduced, I needed to write a justification. The justification also included a cost calculation for our then 4 licences (different levels of CS packages) against the new system. The price of the subscription was about the same as uprading every second major version of the software. And there was no cost in acquiring the software. And all Creative Cloud software was at the same level and included the same programs.

You also need to consider that cost for professionals is not the same as cost for private persons. Companies tend to lease anything, instead of buying, for accounting reasons.  

For people that have more money than brains, they can keep buying their larger number iPhones and keep paying their subscription fees for their word processor year after year. .

By @Brandon_Tarr

You are mixing hardware and software, but also for phones, you should change your phone, as soon as you won't get (security) updates anymore. It's not important to buy an iPhone, you can also go for Android phones, but don't buy a Windows phone. That one is obsolete, even if it did cost thousands at the time.

If you do not want to use Microsoft Word, you can go for Libre Office. For doing simple textprocessing, it is as good as Microsoft Word. BTW: there must be a reason why you are running Windows and not Linux on your desktop computer. I would guess, it is software availablility. 

For the rest of us, the Photoshop CS6 clone stamp and healing brush are all the functionality that we will ever need, and it works perfectly fine in Windows 11 even without running it in a Windows compatibility mode.

By @Brandon_Tarr

For your use case, Photoshop is an overkill. I would suggest that it is time to check for cheaper alternatives. @Nancy OShea did give you some very nice alternatives. There is just one correction to Nancy's indication for the Photography plan: the subscription is annual only, but you can chose to pay per month or prepay for a year. There is no monthly option as with single application plans, or the complete Creative Cloud plan. 

BTW: the Photography plan is highly popular with photographers, but also with Photoshop users, as the plan is cheaper than the (single app) Photoshop plan. 

All in all: Adobe's subscription model is highly successful and is copied by many other companies. Upgrade prices of other companie's software are at the end as costly as a subscription, but yes, I agree, you do not need to upgrade, and you can save one or the other upgrade, if you do not want to spend the money. However, professionals will upgrade, and upgrades will cost also money. It's your choice. What you can't expect is that any company supports old software on new operating systems. And that is literally true for any software company, independantly from their business model.