My Serial number doesn't work. What should I do?

Question

I just installed the Adobe CS4 Master Collection on my new laptop. All of the Adobe applications work perfectly fine except for Photoshop. It tells me that my serial number was already used twice. What should I do?
It is letting me do a 30 day trial. But Photoshop is really the only Adobe app I need. With my luck, its the only one not working for me.
Why is it that only one app is telling me that the serial # is wrong? and what should I do?

Answer 1

Dragonz,
It appears that you have Activated PS on the two allowed machines already. You ARE allowed two Activations only. As has been pointed out, you can Deactivate one of those. Also, the EULA does allow Activation on two personal computers, but they may not be run at the same time - that goes for ALL of the components of any suite too, so you cannot run InDesign on one computer, while doing PS work on the other. [That one got me sometime back, and the Adobe Product Manager had to go to Adobe Legal, for a ruling. I had been breaking my EULA, though always try to follow that to the "letter of the law." Luckily for me, I had two separate (non-suite) stand-alone licenses for PS, and not used in any upgrade path, so once I Deactivated, uninstalled, reinstalled (from one of the stand-alones) and Activated, I was again "legal."]
If you HAVE only Activated on one personal computer, then there is a problem, and as Noel mentions, a call to Adobe Customer Support (not Technical Support), should be able to fix things quickly and painlessly.
Once, there was also a limit on the number of installations allowed, which could be reset by C/S, if exceeded. IIRC, that policy was discontinued, as of Feb, 2010. Still, there ARE limits on Activations, and only two copies of each program can be Activated at the same tim.
Good luck,
Hunt