Activate Acrobat 8 - LOCKED, dead product

[#1]

I’m in the UK and am trying to activate a previously-unused copy of Acrobat 8 Pro which was still in its shrink-wrap.

The Activate option under Help was disabled, so after a bit of googling around I downloaded and installed the Licensing Repair Tool from www.adobe.com/support/contact/licensing.html.

This enabled the Help|Activate button but when I click it a pop-up headed “Internet Connection Not Detected” appears and offers 3 options:

1 - Retry activating
2 - Adjust your Internet connection ... if you use a proxy
3 - Activate over the telephone

1 never succeeds. 2 is pointless because I don’t use a proxy - I have a bog-standard Win10 (Home, 64-bit) laptop connected to the internet through a standard broadband connection which is working fine for everything else. For 3 I tried the 2 UK numbers but they are disconnected, so I phoned the US one which announced that Adobe not longer supports telephone activation and pointed me to www.adobe.com/go/activation but that contains, afaics, no information whatever about activating Acrobat8.

I have checked that my computer’s time and date are correct.

So my question is, how **do** I activate this never-previously-used copy of Acrobat8. Btw, the fact that I’m trying to do this on Win10 is irrelevant (though google finds plenty of Q&As saying there may be problems with Acrobat8 on Win10), because I don’t believe the dead-ends I’ve run into are anything to do with Win10 and I have had Acrobat 8 (with different serial number) running faultlessly on an identical Win10 laptop since Win10 came out.

Thanks, Martyn

[#2]

I’m in the UK and am trying to activate a previously-unused copy of Acrobat 8 Pro which was still in its shrink-wrap.

The Activate option under Help was disabled, so after a bit of googling around I downloaded and installed the Licensing Repair Tool from www.adobe.com/support/contact/licensing.html.

This enabled the Help|Activate button but when I click it a pop-up headed “Internet Connection Not Detected” appears and offers 3 options:

1 - Retry activating
2 - Adjust your Internet connection ... if you use a proxy
3 - Activate over the telephone

1 never succeeds. 2 is pointless because I don’t use a proxy - I have a bog-standard Win10 (Home, 64-bit) laptop connected to the internet through a standard broadband connection which is working fine for everything else. For 3 I tried the 2 UK numbers but they are disconnected, so I phoned the US one which announced that Adobe not longer supports telephone activation and pointed me to www.adobe.com/go/activation but that contains, afaics, no information whatever about activating Acrobat8.

I have checked that my computer’s time and date are correct.

So my question is, how **do** I activate this never-previously-used copy of Acrobat8. Btw, the fact that I’m trying to do this on Win10 is irrelevant (though google finds plenty of Q&As saying there may be problems with Acrobat8 on Win10), because I don’t believe the dead-ends I’ve run into are anything to do with Win10 and I have had Acrobat 8 (with different serial number) running faultlessly on an identical Win10 laptop since Win10 came out.

Thanks, Martyn

[#3]

i don't think you can activate old versions of acrobat.  you can confirm by using a browser that allows popups and cookies, contacting adobe support during pst business hours by clicking here, https://helpx.adobe.com/contact.html


click contact us (in the lower right)
in the chat field, type BILLING AGENT
be patient, it can take quite a while to reach a human

[#4]

Thanks, but if that's true, it's outrageous. A company requires that a
product be activated and then removes the mean for activating it!

In any case, the show-stopping problem is the activation pop-up's claim
that it couldn't detect an Internet connection.

Martyn

[#5 · Accepted solution]

Acrobat 8 cannot be installed anymore.  It's obsolete, discontinued and unsupported.  I don't know where you got your copy but it's very, very old.  There is no such thing as a "forever license."  Adobe owns the software and every product has an end-of-life date after which the product maker must terminate access.  For security reasons, you really need modern software.

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https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acrobat/pdf-reader.html

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[#6]

No longer possible. The activation server was closed down after 10 years. Now 14 years old, this is truly obsolete and useless now (unless you had it already installed). Warning, scammers may contact you privately pretending to be Adobe staff. Adobe will never send you a private message asking you to email an account that isn't @adobe.com, or use Skype. Adobe never ask you for their password. These scammers want your Adobe info, credit cards, your money and control of your computer, please take care.