Activation necessary after Windows 10 update (Anniversary Update)

[hawx2k 6]

Good morning,

 

it appears as if every time Windows 10 gets one of the major upgrades (recently the Win10 Anniversary Update) you have to re-activate all PMDG aircraft. Only a slight annoyance, but perhaps something you can look into in a future update / activation process revision? 

 

Thanks so much,

 

Jan

[AnkH 2,233]

Ok, great. That is exactly what I feared. So the same story again and also for all FSDT products I guess. What a mess. If Microsofts really want's to make life easier with those updates instead of W11, W12 etc., they should really do something about this. For me, the "guilt" here is 100% with Microsoft and not with the addon developers...

[bursco 14]

Having same problems with FSlabs Concorde,fsdt,and PMDG, also have probs with some of my passwords - have deferred the anniversary update and it installed only security updates - dcs works and Xplane works - why all this trouble with p3d (fsx?) - paid a fortune to run this software and cannot enjoy it with Microsoft messing everything up.

Fed up

Denis Brown.

[Peter Webber 339]

Good morning,

 

it appears as if every time Windows 10 gets one of the major upgrades (recently the Win10 Anniversary Update) you have to re-activate all PMDG aircraft. Only a slight annoyance, but perhaps something you can look into in a future update / activation process revision? 

 

Thanks so much,

 

Jan

That's odd. I didn't have to reactivate any of my PMDG products after that update. Only when I went from 8.1 to 10. All I lost was my Nvidia control panel specific settings for P3D. What simulator are you using?

[scandinavian13 5,192]

 

 

Only a slight annoyance, but perhaps something you can look into in a future update / activation process revision? 

 

We've made the system fairly bulletproof: you can uninstall/reinstall the aircraft as much as you want, uninstall/reinstall your entire simulator environment as much as you want, change out all kinds of hardware, change IPs, and a number of other things and the activation will be unaffected. If something on your system removes the license, however, the system is going to ask you to activate the product again. This is rare, but it may happen, as you've seen.

 

For what it's worth, this is the first report that I've seen of this issue. Most of the time, activation issues stem from people not understanding the purpose/use of the license return function (and return the license when uninstalling/reinstalling, and do so habitually - don't do this, please), disabling system functions without understanding what they're doing (disabling services for the performance "boost"), and running a search on their PC for anything with "PMDG" in the name/contents and deleting it on each uninstall/reinstall (again - don't do this, it's completely unnecessary, adds extra work for the team here, but also makes you wait until we can manually return the license if you've run out of activations). Very rarely do the issues actually stem from something like this.

 

Given that an update of this size is changing a ton of operating system files, I'm not terribly surprised that it accidentally trampled your activation in the process, but there's no way we can really predict something like that, or even work around it.

[hawx2k 6]

Thanks for all your feedback. At least now I know I'm not the only one.

 

 

We've made the system fairly bulletproof: you can uninstall/reinstall the aircraft as much as you want, uninstall/reinstall your entire simulator environment as much as you want, change out all kinds of hardware, change IPs, and a number of other things and the activation will be unaffected. If something on your system removes the license, however, the system is going to ask you to activate the product again. This is rare, but it may happen, as you've seen.

 

For what it's worth, this is the first report that I've seen of this issue. Most of the time, activation issues stem from people not understanding the purpose/use of the license return function (and return the license when uninstalling/reinstalling, and do so habitually - don't do this, please), disabling system functions without understanding what they're doing (disabling services for the performance "boost"), and running a search on their PC for anything with "PMDG" in the name/contents and deleting it on each uninstall/reinstall (again - don't do this, it's completely unnecessary, adds extra work for the team here, but also makes you wait until we can manually return the license if you've run out of activations). Very rarely do the issues actually stem from something like this.

 

Given that an update of this size is changing a ton of operating system files, I'm not terribly surprised that it accidentally trampled your activation in the process, but there's no way we can really predict something like that, or even work around it.

 

Thanks Kyle for the insight. You can be assured that I'm sufficiently tech savvy to not mess around with what you suggest/imply above . I also wasn't implying any guilt on either side - Microsoft or PMDG's - but merely pointing out an issue that I had run into and wanted to let you know, so you can consider looking into it. If you don't consider it a broad issue which your data seem to suggest, then by all means disregard my input .

 

Best,

 

Jan

Thanks for all your 

[scandinavian13 5,192]

 

 

You can be assured that I'm sufficiently tech savvy to not mess around with what you suggest/imply above

 

Good to know. Sorry for the assumption, but we do get a lot of it in the queue.

 

 

 

I also wasn't implying any guilt on either side - Microsoft or PMDG's - but merely pointing out an issue that I had run into and wanted to let you know, so you can consider looking into it. If you don't consider it a broad issue which your data seem to suggest, then by all means disregard my input .

 

Understandable. I can see how it would be a pain to have to go track that information down. I probably just downplay the amount of work since I'm in the system looking at keys each evening. All the same, I don't see how we could make it more bulletproof at the moment, but it's nice to see feedback. If nobody provided it, then it would be tough to see where to improve.

[harrry 322]

It may be  an opportune place to tell us what the return licence function is for and how and when to use it.  It seems there is confusion.

[pete_auau 1,152]

It may be an opportune place to tell us what the return licence function is for and how and when to use it. It seems there is confusion.

 

 

There not  much confusion as its explained  in the introduction  manual,  good place  to start  from if  you  want  to find  info. In short  it a measure  to view your licence key if  you want  to view  it for  support issues  and  if  your  re formating  your pc  or  hardware  or  changing  your  pc  etc.  Anyway  if  you want  more  info  than have  a look at the introduction manual

[harrry 322]

There not  much confusion as its explained  in the introduction  manual,  good place  to start  from if  you  want  to find  info. In short  it a measure  to view your licence key if  you want  to view  it for  support issues  and  if  your  re formating  your pc  or  hardware  or  changing  your  pc  etc.  Anyway  if  you want  more  info  than have  a look at the introduction manual

It would seem judging on scaninavian13's post that there are some to whom this is a problem.  If not there would have  been no reason for his writing this:

 

"

. Most of the time, activation issues stem from people not understanding the purpose/use of the license return function (and return the license when uninstalling/reinstalling, and do so habitually - don't do this, please), disabling system functions without understanding what they're doing (disabling services for the performance "boost"), and running a search on their PC for anything with "PMDG" in the name/contents and deleting it on each uninstall/reinstall (again - don't do this, it's completely unnecessary, adds extra work for the team here, but also makes you wait until we can manually return the license if you've run out of activations). Very rarely do the issues actually stem from something like this.

"

[pete_auau 1,152]

  if  people  would  read  the introduction manual first  then  there  would be  no  cause  for  kyle  to post  anymore

[harrry 322]

I would add that I just counted my manual and Intro manuals on my bookshelf...I have not included the ones I have not printed though they are on disk.  came to 287.   i have read these generally on first install but after that generally use the method Kyle does  not like of searching.  It is asking a bit much for a user to remember all of these and where to get the information straight away.  This is a good thing though as we would hate to see kyle out of a job.

[wedgantilles 76]

I can say that on my side the windows 10 anniversary update did not caused any kind of issues with my system and PMDG product activation.

[Jude Bradley 659]

Me neither.

[scandinavian13 5,192]

It may be  an opportune place to tell us what the return licence function is for and how and when to use it.  It seems there is confusion.

 

As mentioned in the Intro Manual, you should return the key before the following cases (and ONLY in these cases):

• Changing major hardware: new hard drive, new motherboard, etc.
• Changing computers
• Reinstalling your entire Operating System

 

 

Common mistakes:

• Returning on each uninstall/reinstall of the aircraft - do not do this unless you like unnecessary delays
• Returning on each uninstall/reinstall of the simulator - do not do this unless you like unnecessary delays

Related mistakes:

• Not checking to see if your activation attempt gets rejected after forgetting to return the license before changing hardware, computers, or reinstalling your OS.