Participant

Question

Serial number and activation key for CS6 for MAC

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
February 28, 2017
4 replies
81126 views

Hi

I worked as a consultant in 2012, the company I was working for bought me a license for Indesign and Photoshop CS6. I added it to my old MAC and now I want to install it on my new macbook air. However I don't have the serial number or activation key anywhere. How do I get a hold of those when they are not on my adobe page?

I have contacted customer service but they could not help as they do not offer technical support for these types of licenses.

PLEASE HELP

Regards

Sara

F

flaming1

Inspiring

Sara, if you do sort out your licence then there is a good chance CS6 will actually run on your brand new Mac.

Unfortunately there are a few people on these forums who endlessly repeat their 'CS6 will not work because it is not supported' mantra and 'it's a huge risk using CS6'. It is just their opinion and has no basis in fact - reinforced by the fact that they can never qualify why it won't work or why it is a huge risk.

Running the latest CC2017 is just as much a risk - or more of a risk if you read these forums and see the amount of people having problems with it. I use both versions every day and CC gives me far more problems.

The beauty of CS6 is that what you see is what you get and it just runs, whereas CC2017 is constantly having new bugs added.

Those of us who have stuck with CS6 and have it running beautifully on the latest Macs under the latest MacOS (Sierra) are referred to by them as 'lucky' - perhaps because we have software with very few bugs that runs very fast. CS6 runs now just like it always has.

Steve Werner

Community Expert

@Flaming,

We welcome you to the forum to provide support for the poor users of CS6 trying to install or run their software on recent operating systems. We usually have two or three of them every day! You'll be kept pretty busy. As you know, they are no longer supported by Adobe, and most of us forum regular have given up on them.

We could use your help and expertise.

Steve Werner

Community Expert

You can't seriously say 'most people' with any sort of conviction Steve.

You only see people who come here with problems. All the people who have it running successfully generally wouldn't visit to tell you that they have no problems. We have no idea how many people are running it without any issues.

Using your criteria you could say with equal conviction that 'most people have problems when they install and try to use Indesign CC2017', judging by the number of reports you see on this forum. That is presumably not the case.

If people have problems with CS6 they can come here and ask, just like the people who come here to seek help with CC2017 problems. There should be no difference.

And nobody should realistically expect Adobe to give them any support on a personal level. If that was an option forums like this would have very little reason to exist, and yes I have had significant amounts of time wasted trying to get Adobe support in the past.

If Adobe were interested in listening to and supporting their customers they would have kept a perpetual licence. This bit is just my opinion... and that of tens of thousands of other Adobe customers...

But I haven't run CS6 for at least four years. I think that's true of a lot of the people who help out here.

I'm also a teacher and consultant. Only a small number of people I teach or consult with use CS6 or earlier any more. (Honestly, those who hold onto old software don't bother spending money on training or consulting.) MId- and large size companies have almost entirely migrated to the Creative Cloud. Students I teach in training companies and at the university get a subscription.

While I like to volunteer and help here, there isn't much interest for me to load old software. And if we discover a problem, what could I say. There's no updates coming.

That's why I'm happy you're going to stick around here and help. We need more people like you!

BobLevine

Community Expert

Without the serial number or proof of purchase, I’m afraid you’re probably out of luck. In addition, the chances of getting CS6 applications to work properly on a new Mac are not very high.

M

Migintosh

Legend

If this seems like a highjack, please disregard, but I think it might also be helpful.

The IT guy from my current company retired a while back, and the new IT guy can't find serial numbers or registration codes for some of our workstations. The old guy didn't keep the boxes and CDs well organized, and some can't be found, and we're not sure if CS5 or 5.5 were available as downloads. We all use CS5.5 currently, and when he asked Adobe, they said one of the 24-digit numbers that we have is "not a valid Adobe ID." We don't know if the old IT guy just never registered it (he didn't make an Adobe log-in), and a Read-Me on a backup looks like this:

We want to upgrade, but it's financially difficult to justify if we can make it work with what we have, but one of our workstations has gone to demo mode, and we'd like to get it back to working before it times out. Any ideas?

Dov Isaacs

Legend

CS5.5 was not a free upgrade from CS5. If your group is running CS5.5, running the CS5.5 installer using the CS5 serial number isn't going to work. CS5.5 upgrades came with their own serial numbers to be entered. If CS5 wasn't previously installed, it would prompt for the CS5 serial number as well.

Unless you bought a volume license for your organization and the vendor still has records of your purchase and serial number(s), since you didn't register with Adobe and their was no Adobe ID, there isn't much Adobe can assist you with.

- Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)