Unfortunately I still happen to love one program in particular from the Adobe CS2 Premium Suite which was Adobe Golive their (at the time) flagship WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website design software. Which when compared to Macromedia Dreamweaver (now known as Adobe Dreamweaver) was much easier and more intuitive to use and integrated well with Adobe software. Unfortunately they dropped the software when they acquired their biggest competitor Macromedia Dreamweaver. What this meant or me is that after upgrading my machine to a newer Windows Vista 64 Bit machine back in 2008 I had to load the entire CS2 Suite just so I could have Adobe GOLIVE 8 on my system.
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| Red White and Blue and MERICA 4th of July Design with Adobe Creative Suite 2 Installation CDs |
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| DJ Emir's Creative Suite 2 Premium Installation CDs and Work Station Computer |
I now use Adobe CS6 Master Suite and also have started trioals on Adobe CC (Creative Cloud) which has a cloud based software suite that is a paid month per month basis. Personally I prefer to buy the software one time and not pay monthly but the month to month means you don't have to worry about huge updates costing over $1500 so you can keep up with updates. And the update process is now much simpler. We'll see if after the trial period expires whether I go back to CS6 a little longer or start on CC. For now I can tell you CS6 seems to run faster than Photoshop CC and though Adobe in their forums keeps saying it's 3rd party plug ins or people's hardware and software configurations, drivers etc there obviously must be something wrong if plenty of people keep saying the same thing, that Adobe CC acts much slower than Adobe CS6 and also tries to use more resources.
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| CS6 Creative Suite Master Edition Discount Pricing at Adobe Website |
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| Adobe CS6 Master Suite |
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| Adobe CS6 Master Design Suite With Photo Audio, Video and Website Design And Production Tools |
But I digress, back to the subject at hand which is of Course the announcement of CS2 being released Free on www.Adobe.com I recently wiped my hard drive clean and did a full refresh of my Operating system then reloaded CS2 and CS6 onto my system. Why both suites? For one program and one program only! Adobe GoLive, which they dropped from their CS3-CS6 offerings. While I am now using Dreamweaver CS6 and Dreamweaver CC Trial software to design websites, my own website www.djemir.com and a few other websites I designed including www.hunkstheshow.com were originally created in Adobe GoLive and as such they are just easier to navigate and modify in GoLive. What this means for me is that I have to go through the headache of doing a few work arounds to get Adobe CS2 to properly install onto a Windows 64Bit machine.
In the past when I called adobe for help I always got the same run around. They would just tell me that CS2 is not compatible with Windows Vista or Windows 7 and that I should just purchase the Adobe CS3 Upgrade (at that time it was CS4) I felt like they did me wrong with that answer, after all I did pay around $1700 for my Adobe CS2 Premium suite so that it could now just be used as a paper weight. With that kind of price I should have gotten good customer support and not a run around answer every time I contacted them. They should have done their research and realized that there are actually ways of getting CS2 to work on older systems (well get to that in a minute) After a ton of research I finally found a few people that were able to successfully install Adobe CS2 onto their Windows 64 Bit systems. The work around was to take your CDs and download all the contents of each CD onto your hard drive then make sure to change the properties of each folder and each launcher including the main executable install file to Open as administrator in Backwards compatibility mode set for Windows XP Service Pack 3. Then launch the install and it should work fine. But it didn't, it almost installed properly but when authorizing would give me an error stating that the programs had invalid Serial Number etc. The Suite has One serial number but I think it issues seperate authorizations and serials for the programs automatically during install but not if they are installed incorrectly. Unfortunately the installer does not know how to install into the Programs (x86) folder which is meant for all 32bit programs. The Adobe installer would not let me specify the x86 program folder because of the space between program and (x86) so after even more research I found the work around solution to that problem as well. Take note because in order to install the Free downloads from Adobe you also need to use this particular workaround as well if you are on a 64 bit system.
Open an MSDOS command prompt then CD \ , then do DIR /X to list and determine the proper "short name" for the Program Files (x86) folder which turned out to be C:\progra~2 (not C:\program~2), then follow it with\adobe , i.e. the full path name is C:\progra~2\adobe and this then installs all programs properly into the long name folder C:\Program Files (x86) and will get rid of the Your adobe photoshop user name, organisation, or serial number is missing or invalid , and the programs will now work properly.
Once you get it to install into that system and authorize it, everything should work just fine. Now it would be nice if Adobe would have done this research for me back in the day as I'm sure many other clients also experienced the same horrors when they bought a new machine and suddenly discovered that their expensive Software bundle no longer was supported and that Adobe would not have an answer for how to install their software onto a new system.
Flash forward a few more years to present day (August / September 2014) I just built a new PC with an Asus Z97 Sabertooth Motherboard, Pentium i7 4790K Unlocked Processor Running at 4.5Ghz, Corsair 760 Graphite Case, Corsair H100 Liquid CPU Cooling Unit and Asus 770 GTX Graphics Card and 32GB of RAM and once again I find myself loading both CS6 and CS2 Software suites. Basically only loading CS2 just so I can have AdobeGoLive on my system. But this time after the entire process I run into a new issue. I try and activate the CS2 software but keep getting an error message. Turns out that online activation has been turned off and phone support and phone activation for CS2 is also no longer available as well. I start chatting with Adobe Support and they tell me I can no longer use the CDs to install but that while they will no longer offer technical support and don't recommend using the programs as they will not work with newer systems (which actually is incorrect since with the right tweaks they can work with newer systems) they have now created a free download for past customers that have the suite to use for installation instead.
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=cs2_downloads#
Technically speaking this is for past paid customers like myself that already own the suite but tons of blogs and websites have found out about the links and have posted a copy of the link with statements like Adobe released free versions of their software, which technically isn't the case but if you are desperate to try Adobe Software and need more than the one month trial of Adobe CC which I would recommend you try or try and buy a copy of at least CS6 which was the latest version before they switched to a cloud based subscription system. Then here is the download link for CS2 software:
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=cs2_downloads#
again while installing make sure you install to the Programs (x86) folder using the path:
open a MSDOS command prompt then CD \ , then do DIR /X to list and determine the proper "short name" for theProgram Files (x86) folder which turned out to be C:\progra~2 (not C:\program~2), then follow it with\adobe , i.e. the full path name is C:\progra~2\adobe and this then installs all programs properly into the long name folder C:\Program Files (x86) and will get rid of the Your adobe photoshop user name, organisation, or serial number is missing or invalid , and the programs will now work properly.
I remind you that this is a good introduction to Adobe products but these are much older versions of their programs and you would do better to get a few of their updated versions. However in a pinch they work ok. They worked fine for me from 2005 through 2010 and people would often say things like "Damn you created that in CS2? I'm on CS5 and I can't make it look that good!" Well as Eric Clapton best put it in his song from the Movie soundtrack "The Color Of Money" (with Tom Cruise)... "It's in the way that you use it" basically these programs are just tools for creation, the artist still has to use them with a creative mind to create masterpieces.
Ive been using Photoshop since Version 4 and Have owned Photoshop since version 5 and to be honest the tools have not changed much from CS2 to CS6 for what I need. There are many extras now and more filters and now the ability to create 3D objects within Photoshop so that is a huge difference but as far as image manipulation many of the same tools I have been using are still the ones I use the most. that being said, there is still a great reason to switch to later versions of Photoshop as later versions like CS6 and Photoshop CC2014 now offer full support of all RAM memory on your system and can take advantage of your Graphics Card (GPU) whereas for Photoshop CS2 being created at a time with much less RAM and lesser Graphics Processors it has a limit of 4GB of RAM that it will recognize. In my Case that made a huge difference of using only 4GB versus the full 24GB that was installed in my system so once I started using CS6 and later Adobe CC it made a huge difference in speed when using the two programs so I decided to invest in my tools. And when my computer later started slowing me down, then also in my computer system as well.
I was on a first generation i7 at 2.7ghz with 24GB of 1600Mhz DDR3 (4GB each x 6 DDR3 sticks) and a 630 GTX Graphics Card, I just finished a new custom computer build with a 4th generation i7 at 4.5ghz (overclocked) I had to drop my RAM down to 16GB because my old computer had 6 slots and the new one only has 4 (I plan on getting larger RAM in either 8gb or 16 gb sticks to bring my total back up to 36GB with faster mhz as well (8GB Sticks x 4 slots) or 64 gb (16Gb sticks x 4 slots) but for now even with less RAM the faster GPU and faster architecture of the motherboard's high speed sata ports with SSD drives makes for a faster computer anyway. my Save time just dropped from 2-6 minutes per file down to 5-12 seconds... huge drop in time and huge gains in productivity! I was worried my new system would not make too much difference, but it does, completely worth the investment as was the investment of CS6 over CS2 and CS4 which I had before. Adobe CC still hasn't convinced me it is worth it yet, but give it one more upgrade generation say 2015 and it probably will be. Just my thoughts. - www.djemir.com
PS: If anyone needs flyer designs, logos or graphics, or if you are a designer and just need inspiration or something to critique and compare you can visit www.djemir.com/designs.html
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