Adobe Giving Away Old Software

[veggiesosage]

For those of you on a budget you might be interested in picking up some of Adobe's old software for free. Headline catch is CS2

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

You need an adobe account but that's it.

[Pops]

Re: Adobe Giving Away Old Software

Nice one. Good page for thin wallets

[Pol]

Re: Adobe Giving Away Old Software

For those of you on a budget you might be interested in picking up some of Adobe's old software for free. Headline catch is CS2

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

You need an adobe account but that's it.

Nice one, but be aware that CS2 is massive as it has 'Image Ready' as well as Photoshop. Image ready was included up to and including CS3 - which meant those earlier versions were rather slow to load.

Pol

[JSR]

Re: Adobe Giving Away Old Software

Nice find.

There's more than just CS2 on there. I recently posted about Windows 8's annoying UAC warning every time I ran my Adobe Acrobat 5.0 (it works fine, I just get that warning every time it opens - which is fairly frequent when I'm creating/editing PDFs).

From that page, I've been able to download version 8.0 and that's working just fine without any annoying UAC pop-ups.

There's lot of talk on the web, including many hastily-revised blogs, which are stating that Adobe didn't intend to give the software away free and was only providing it as a courtesy to those who've already got legitimately-bought versions so that they would continue to work after the activation servers are discontinued. There's apparently nothing in the EULA license agreement to that effect, and the page is still there for downloading, so I'm not sure what the real facts are.

Incidentally, I've downloaded and installed Acrobat 8.0 without requiring an Adobe account - so does that just apply to CS2? I've often been tempted to try out CS but it's always been (i) too much bloatware for my previous computers, and (ii) too expensive for my tiny wallet. If it's all legit, then I'm ready to see if it works on my Windows 8 laptop.

[Ian]

Re: Adobe Giving Away Old Software

Apart from the fact that Photoshop CS2 has curves and a more powerful implementation of Layers than Elements, much of the rest of Photoshop Elements 10/11 is superior now.

Also CS2 Adobe Camera RAW is very primitive compared to the latest versions.

But as JSR has found - the distribution of CS2 like this has its plus points

Ian

[JSR]

Re: Adobe Giving Away Old Software

Apart from the fact that Photoshop CS2 has curves and a more powerful implementation of Layers than Elements, much of the rest of Photoshop Elements 10/11 is superior now.

Also CS2 Adobe Camera RAW is very primitive compared to the latest versions.

But as JSR has found - the distribution of CS2 like this has its plus points

Ian

[Graham_of_Rainham]

Re: Adobe Giving Away Old Software

I tried to look at this but it seems to have gone

Adobe disabled the activation server for CS2 products and Acrobat 7 because of a technical glitch. These products were released over 7 years ago and do not run on many modern operating systems. But to ensure that any customers activating those old versions can continue to use their software, we issued a serial number directly to those customers. While this might be interpreted as Adobe giving away software for free, we did it to help our customers

[Ian]

Re: Adobe Giving Away Old Software

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

Just had a look - it's still there...

Ian

[JSR]

Re: Adobe Giving Away Old Software

I tried to look at this but it seems to have gone

The link in the first post works for me.

[Graham_of_Rainham]

Re: Adobe Giving Away Old Software

The link in the first post works for me.

I recon it must be a "clever" page that detects my Win7Pro system and only shows software that will work on it. My XP Laptop goes there just fine.

Thanks

[andym]

Re: Adobe Giving Away Old Software

I recon it must be a "clever" page that detects my Win7Pro system and only shows software that will work on it. My XP Laptop goes there just fine.

Thanks

I downloaded a couple of days ago and have it running on my Windows 7 machine.It might be cleaver but I'm not

[JSR]

Re: Adobe Giving Away Old Software

I recon it must be a "clever" page that detects my Win7Pro system and only shows software that will work on it. My XP Laptop goes there just fine.

Thanks

I'm not sure what it has against your Win7Pro system, but it didn't try to be clever with my Windows 8 system..!

[JSR]

Re: Adobe Giving Away Old Software

I installed CS2 this evening on my new Windows 8 laptop.

I did it my own way at first. I extracted all the EXE files into the same folder and then ISO'd them up into a single disc image. I could then double-click to mount the ISO as a Virtual DVD, and from there I ran the setup.exe.

On starting the installation, the installer has trouble with the install location. It suggests CProgram Files (x86)\Adobe which is perfectly sensible but then says that this is an invalid location. For some reason, despite this software harking from 2005, it requires a DOS-valid path (so a Google reveals). DOS-valid would be a path without spaces and in typical DOS 8.3 format. I found the DOS-valid path (using some DOS commands from hazy memory of my distant past), and changed the installation path to CPROGRA~2\ADOBE before continuing.

Anyway, I now appear to have CS2 installed. I've just fired up PhotoShop and it opens a JPG just fine, so I'll play with it more once I have the time.

Installation didn't take very long (less than the 20 minutes the installer estimated), and I wasn't troubled with changing of CDs or anything because the installer found everything in my ISO.

I've also installed Acrobat Professional 8.0. The only trouble I had during installation was that the installer insisted that I insert the "Vista" CD so that it could locate the file "AdobePDF.dll". Googling revealed that this file is in the downloaded exe, so you can find it wherever the files were extracted prior to installation.

But, so far, Photoshop CS2 and Acrobat Professional 8.0 both seem to be working just fine on Windows 8.

These products were released over 7 years ago and do not run on many modern operating systems.

I'm not entirely sure of the "many modern operating systems" they feel this software won't run on. They're probably referring to the Mac version which, as I understand it, will only run on PowerPC systems, not the newer Intel-based Macs.