My MacBook is having some repair work done on it. Since I knew I would be without for a few weeks, I made a second clone of my hard drive on an external to operate on my sons' MacBooks and my wife's MacBook Pro. I wasn't sure whether Adobe's activation system takes into account what computer you are on or if it looks for something in the system.

I called them up and asked if I needed to deactivate InDesign CS5 and Photoshop CS5 before taking it in for repair and whether I would need to deactivate the other computers I was on using my cloned system. The representative wasn't really sure and suggested I deactivate any time I have to switch which computer I'm booting off of.

Anyone here know specifically if that's necessary. I don't want to get into the position of getting my MacBook back and finding out I can't activate it until I deactivate those programs on the other computers.

For clarity, I'm not installing ID or PS on any other computers. They are installed on my external hard drive that has my system on it. I hope this makes sense.

Thanks,
Michael

When I evacuated from New Orleans for Katrina in '95, I was only able to take my backup clone and boot from that via a friend's PowerBook. At some point (after a couple weeks of starting up from the external and running it) InDesign wouldn't launch. I called Adobe and got them to reset the "allowable non-primary machine starts" and the guy told me he'd reset it to something ridiculously high so I wouldn't have to worry about it.

That was 2005, though, so the system has probably changed since then. Not directly helpful, but more like a cocktail party story I break in and share.

So, suffice to say, I was able to boot from the external and work for a good amount of time and, when it stopped working, a 15 minute (literally) phone call cleared up the issue.

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Well, at least it's comforting to know that Adobe worked with you on it.