March 3, 2007
MarkBernstein.org
 

Acrobatics

I had to throw a fresh hard drive into the Tinderbook a while back, and I'm still reinstalling some of the software I don’t need every day.

Acrobat 7 Professional wants to see an older version of Acrobat. But I don't really want to install the old version. And then I'd need to install an even older version. We've been using Acrobat a long time.

Acrobat says, "call Adobe: here's a URL for our phone number." The URL is 404.

I call Adobe. After lots and lots of hold music, Adobe tells me that if you can't locate your original media, you're out of luck. Not just about buying the $149 upgrade: looks like we could easily fall off the upgrade path entirely. The fact that we've owned Acrobat since Acrobat 2 doesn't matter. (Apparently, we can still upgrade. Will it actually work? Nobody seems entirely confident.)

I do have the original Amazon receipt. But Amazon isn't an authorized dealer, so no support for our 7.0 upgrade. Adobe 6 came direct, so that's OK.

We're the phone company. We don’t care: we don’t have to.

Lesson: hang on to your media, or prepare for life after Acrobat.