"Your Product Activation Key Reached Its Activation Limit..."

License migration

I am going to be taking my current machine in for a motherboard replacement, and I need to activate Parallels on the replacement machine for e the duration of the repair, then activate again on the repaired machine in a few weeks. And I am under a huge deadline as well so I would like to know exactly what I need to do ahead of time to minimize additional downtime. Worst possible time for hardware problems!

Also, why can't this just be publicly answered? Is seems ridiculous that we have to ask, then wait for a PM. Why can't it just go in the FAQ and make everyone's life easier?

Thanks!
Gordon
 
AFAIK, what happens is this, PDM has a two activations limit, and this limit can only be reset manually by Parallels personnel.

In your specific case, when you get your mac back you may or may not need to contact Parallels to 'rearm' your activation limit.
 
Having just migrated to a new Macbook and seeing this error for the first time, and now having 3 systems, this info just convinced me to switch to VM personal. Many thanks!

AparajitaF said:
I checked out VMware 6. Faster, smoother, more control, better licensing. Imported my Parallels VM perfectly. Bye-bye Parallels.
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So, basically, because of Parallels' shitty approach to licensing I will be forced to wait until I have the new machine and then find out if I need a reactivation and then beg Parallels for one. All while I am under the gun on deadlines? Yeah, I suspect I will switch to VMWare instead. What a retarded way to treat customers who have been paying $$$ every fucking year. And STILL we don't have meaningful GPU acceleration or DX11 support. What a joke.
 
PragmaticPraxis said:
And STILL we don't have meaningful GPU acceleration or DX11 support.
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My reply was not intended to be a definitive answer, this was merely an AFAIK (as far as I know).

I personally agree that Parallels should change the way they are doing licensing.

But you are way off in your 3D support argument. PDM has always had consistently better 3D performance than the competition, look up any review.
Also, I'm sorry to inform you that VMWare Fusion doesn't support DX11.
Finally, I really don't understand the lack 'meaningful GPU acceleration' you speak of. In many 3D tasks you get an equivalent 3D performance as you would be running natively (in Windows with Parallels Tools installed).
 
Specimen, first off, my apologies for sounding like I was attacking you. Not my intention at all.

As for my performance complaints, understand that I am a professional user. I could give %@$# if it "runs Crysis" or any such drek. I need performance in tools like Autodesk Revit. i would gladly pay $100 a year for something like Parallels Workstation, that makes great use of a dedicated GPU. I can see running Revit in Parallels on a Mac Pro with very good results. And I would pay even more to see ZERO effort put into supporting games and such in this "professional' version of Parallels. intend I am stuck with a yearly expense that shows, outside of games, no meaningful performance boost, and is certainly using way less of the GPU than I would see in BootCamp. My Revit benchmarks consistently show a HUGE hit in graphics performance inParallels, and a much smaller hit in CPU constrained performance.
And yes, I know VMWare doesn't do this either, and it is even more embarrassing for them as they "claim" to be more targeted to professionals. Parallels pretty much admits they are whoring the gamer market. But the quick money is in taking it from children, so yeah, makes sense.
Gordon
 
Specimen,
First off, my apologies if my reply seemed directed at you. It was not intended that way.
Second, my key issue is, I am a professional user. I need Parallels and decent performance not to waste my life on games, but to do productive work. So, while there probably are some games that Parallels has been tuned for, performance in things like Autodesk Revit sucks, nothing near the performance you would see in BootCamp, for example.
What I would LOVE to see is a Parallels Workstation for the Mac. Make it require a discrete GPU at least, and ideally two dedicated discrete GPUs (yes, I want to run this on a Mac Pro!) and wring everything you can out of it. Put ZERO!!! effort into supporting any games at all, or for that matter any DOS, Windows 98/2000/XP/Vista or the rest. Focus on professional programs and Windows 7/8 only. For THAT I would gladly pay $200 a year! But pissing away $50 every year for the crap that the last three years of Parallels Desktop have provided is annoying. It seems like all I really get is compatibility with the new Apple OS (which is now free, and also an improvement every year, at least in my experience and for my needs).
But yeah, I know VM Ware doesn't do this either. In the end it is earlier to make money taking it from children than to focus on professionals. I don't really expect Parallels to care. So I guess just pointless venting.

Gordon
 
Since this seems now to be a performance one, please just let me point out that Apple does neither allow nor provide any deep-level access to the GPU / driver which is needed for virtualization. Of course this applies to all virtualization vendors on the OSX platform.
 
RonSchn said:
Since this seems now to be a performance one, please just let me point out that Apple does neither allow nor provide any deep-level access to the GPU / driver which is needed for virtualization. Of course this applies to all virtualization vendors on the OSX platform.
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True, and for the kind of performance I would really like to see, that is indeed an issue. one that maybe a little pushing could address, what with Apple being a little more open of late.
That said, the GPU is fully available for OpenCL use, and much of what native DX/OpenGL would be doing at the metal level can be directly translated to OpenCL. Is it going to be as fast as native? No. But I suspect it could be much faster than what we have now, which seems to be converting a massively parallel workload to generic compute on the CPU, which has a couple orders of magnitude fewer cores, and the cores are uniquely NOT tuned to the job. The limitation of OpenCL is that the generic compute work you want to do has to conform to an environment that was designed for graphic compute. OpenCL accelerated graphics exactly doesn't have this problem. Mostly it has OpenCL overhead, which may be an issue.
I would assume that none of this is happening now, or Parallels would be crowing about it already.
 
I am having the same problem. My iMac had to be taken in for service and I operated from a hard drive clone on a Mac Mini while waiting for the repair. Had to reenter activation key on the Mac Mini. Once I got the iMac back the message about activation key limit reached came up (logic board was replaced). What do I do to get Parallels working again?
 
After three logic board replacements on my MacBookPro and expiration of AppleCare, I stepped to a new laptop to continue working. Now I cannot activate my copy of Parallels 9 even though it is the same physical hard drive, but new machine. I've sent two emails to Support and have had to reschedule a client since I can't access the client's data for review with them. Does it take complaining here to get a response?

Gene
 
I hope it works, since that's what I'm trying...and I have the same problem -- new logic board, no parallels.

Eugene S Melchionne said:
After three logic board replacements on my MacBookPro and expiration of AppleCare, I stepped to a new laptop to continue working. Now I cannot activate my copy of Parallels 9 even though it is the same physical hard drive, but new machine. I've sent two emails to Support and have had to reschedule a client since I can't access the client's data for review with them. Does it take complaining here to get a response?

Gene
Click to expand...
 
I've had a couple different versions of Parallels over the years and have found that support in the past was very good but now is absolutely miserable. I submitted a support ticket a couple of days ago and never got a response. I think they're spending all their money on advertising.
 
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