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Mark29522245wvu0
Participant
April 23, 2023
Answered

Freehand 9

  • April 23, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 2179 views

Looking for help with Freehand 9. Since all the links to help all point to Adobe and there is no help whatsoever, there doesnt seem to be any place to get help except (hopefully) from here.

 I cant get on with Illustrator i find it really user unfriendly and want to keep using Freehand. My computer had a catastrophic windows crash which seemingly cant be fixed. I can use software get the old programs and files from the hard disk. I have a replacement computer running windows 7. I have two options, i can try to reinstall my old recovered  FH9 or MX (i had both) , or there is on ebay a brand new sealed FH9 packge for sale. It will no doubt load onto the PC but what happens when i try and validate the serial number? I dont want to waste money buying it only to find the serials cant be validated. Similarly if i try to validate my old FH9/MX  serials? I dont think upgrading to W10 or W11 will be any help (people automaticlly seem to suggest doing it??) because i'll probably be in the same position: the program will load but will the serial numbers activate? Surely there has to be some way of validating old serial numbers by Adobe so people can keep using their programs, even if it's not done automatically by a server.  Or is it a case of its old, we just cant be bothered to help with old stuff? Thanks for any suggestions in advance.

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Correct answer Mark29522245wvu0

well, i had nothing to lose so swopped the hard drive with the inaccesible windows on it, to my current PC. Didnt expect to get anywhere, but to my surprise i can access all my programs and files, and have copied the Freehand 9 program folder and all my work to my current PC and everything works great!! So relieved! the old hard drive is just acting as n additional hard disk. It would appear from that then, that no reactivation was necessary. Thanks to all who replied i was getting desperate that i was going to lose everything , at least i didnt spend a fortune on the recovery software for nothing!

2 replies

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Mark29522245wvu0AuthorCorrect answer
Participant
April 24, 2023

well, i had nothing to lose so swopped the hard drive with the inaccesible windows on it, to my current PC. Didnt expect to get anywhere, but to my surprise i can access all my programs and files, and have copied the Freehand 9 program folder and all my work to my current PC and everything works great!! So relieved! the old hard drive is just acting as n additional hard disk. It would appear from that then, that no reactivation was necessary. Thanks to all who replied i was getting desperate that i was going to lose everything , at least i didnt spend a fortune on the recovery software for nothing!

Brad @ Roaring Mouse
Community Expert
Brad @ Roaring MouseCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 27, 2023

Activations tend to be written at a disk level, so since your old hard drive is connected, it still sees the old activation. Should you disconnect the old drive, that may break things, so keep that in mind.

B
Community Expert
Bobby HendersonCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 23, 2023

Freehand is effectively a "dead" application, no longer developed or supported by Adobe. They even removed the ability to import or place Freehand artwork into Illustrator (a choice I do not agree with since some of us have old archived Freehand art files).

 

I don't remember if Freehand 9 required online activation. The activation servers for Freehand MX (and other Studio MX applications) was removed some time ago. I believe there is a "universal" serial number for the Mac and Win installers that makes FH MX work without activation.

 

I'm doubting FH9/MX will run on Windows 10 or 11. I still have my old Freehand CDs (along with various other vintage app CDs), but have not tried installing it on a Win10 or Win11 machine. My guess is in order to successfully install the software it would probably require WinXP or Win7 running on an old PC or in a virtual machine on a newer PC.

 

Just to make a pitch in favor of Illustrator, you can customize the user interface quite a lot (make new tool bars, change keyboard short cuts, etc). I usually start out with the Essentials Classic workspace and then add a few changes here and there. Illustrator does have a lot of keyboard shortcuts in common with Freehand, such as the Ctrl-Alt-Spacebar shortcuts for zooming in/out and hand-panning the view. IIRC the Pen Tool shortcuts are also similar.

 

The last version of Freehand (MX) was released 20 years ago. The application is primitive by today's standards. MX was released just when the OpenType font format was very new; MX offered only basic support of OpenType fonts. IIRC, it didn't support the advanced features and extended character sets in OTFs. And now today we have OpenType Variable and OpenType-SVG changing how type is used. Modern 64-bit graphics applications can handle "heavier" RAM-hungry documents than old 32-bit software.

    M
    Mark29522245wvu0Author
    Participant
    April 24, 2023

    thanks for the reply. It makes you wonder if there is a 'workaround' for MX with the activation then there could also be one for previous editions. I have no idea what the workaround would entail but surely the same principle could be applied? As for Adobe stopping Illustrator reading FH files  thats a very low thing to do isnt it? Did they really hate Freehand so much to do that? The copy of Illustrator i have , the icons are so small you need a magnifying glass to see what they are; it was a major reason i couldnt get on with Illustrator. I have since read there is something you can do to make them slightly bigger but as i cant even access the program with my windows problem  at the moment , i cant try it. I feel sure there will be a way i can still use my old FH9, its just finding it. At the moment im hoping that extracting the program from the old hard disk and reinstalling it on a new pc will work, it wholly depends on whether it will need (re)activating. Thats why i really need to know for sure whether it will or not, before spending quite a lot of money on the extraction program. Is it worth it all just to get access back for FH9? Yes, because i spent a long time learning the program, and did a huge amount of work on it, and still need to use the files created with it. This whole situation is totally un-necessary and only exists because of Adobe's greedy actions.

    Monika Gause
    Community Expert
    Monika GauseCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 24, 2023

    If your icons are too small in Illustrator, then you could enlarge them via. Preferes > User Interface. If you do not have that option, then probably you are still running CS6 and you are running it on a HiDPI system. There is indeed a workaround to make the icons bigger on Windows 8.

    But if you think that it will work better with FreeHand 9 on your HiDPI system, then I have bad news for you. FreeHand is even older than Illustrator CS6 and nobody even thought that HiDPI could be a thing when FreeHand was developed.

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