Activation tip! How to deactivate P3D and keep your license validated

I posted about this in another topic already but I think it's quite an important piece of information so I decided to post this in a seperate topic too. Adam Breed from LM posted the following on the P3D forum:

"You now have the ability to deactivate and reactivate your Prepar3D v2 installation without contacting the licensing support team.

If you activated your license following the “Activate Online (Recommended)” method, you are able to deactivate and reactivate your license on another computer. To deactivate, simply uninstall Prepar3D using the standard Windows Programs and Features manager found under the Control Panel, or by executing the installer Setup.exe or installer Prepar3D.msi and selecting uninstall. Your license will be reset/freed once the uninstall process is complete. This will allow you to activate Prepar3D on another computer without contacting licensing support."

This not only works for when you want to run P3D on another computer but also for when you want to reinstall your OS (like I did last weekend)! It will prevent you from having to wait a day until your license has been revalidated again by LM... ^_^ So whenever you plan to do something drastic to your PC or get a new one, uninstall P3D before you proceed.

Take note that when things do go wrong anyway (in case you forgot to uninstall or your PC crashed and you had no option to do so), you can always mail to [email protected] and request a revalidation of your license. In my case that was done within a day (and since I mailed them on Sunday, it was in fact done within a few office hours!).

For those who like to know more, here is some additional information from Adam Breed about using the standard Windows manager versus the installers. This was an answer to my question why the P3D installer (Setup.exe) gave me the option to uninstall P3D while I had already done so using the Windows option:

"The key is understanding the difference between the Setup.exe and Prepar3D.msi in the download. The Setup.exe is the bootstrapper package that includes all prerequisites (including the Prepar3D.msi), while the Prepar3D.msi is just the core Prepar3D installer. What you see in the Program and Features, and what you end up uninstalling, is the Prepar3D.msi. If you run the Setup.exe after uninstalling from Program and Features, it will still find the prerequisites/records and simply attempt to repair Prepar3D, since it does not need to install the prerequisites again. If you want to remove all prerequisites, along with Prepar3D, you can use the uninstall option by running the Setup.exe again, but that should be unnecessary.

If a user does not want us to install prerequisites and trust that their system is up to date with .NET, DirectX, Visual C redistributables, and MSXML, they can simply use the Prepar3D.msi to install. The point is giving the flexibility to allow users to install Prepar3D the way they want, making it easy for the majority of the user base, and still fitting into the Windows installer rules.

Both methods will still trigger the deactivation and allow you to activate on another computer."