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Why do I need to reassign licenses when installing new drivers?

J

josolomo

New member
I recently bought a new license so I could use AB 3.2 on my new laptop. Then I installed new wireless printer drivers so I could print my army list on my new Epson Workforce wi-fi printer. Then Army Builder tells me the license needed to be reassigned - but since it was the weekend, I had to wait until up to 3 business days for this to happen. So much for my finely crafted 1500 pt chaos space marines army! I had to go back to pen and paper. Needless to say - I got slaughtered by the Tyranid invasion fleet.

All kidding aside - it was the worst possible time for something like this to occur, and I found it very annoying. Is there any way to work around this issue of having to reassign a license when installing something new like a printer driver on your system?
 
There should be absolutely *zero* connection between the two actions. Updating to a new product release will always require you to re-run the license activation wizard. However, installing a printer should have absolutely no impact on the licensing mechanism.

The only thing that would cause the "identity" of your computer to change would be if you made changes to aspects of the computer that are used to determine its "identity". Installing printer drivers should never do that, unless the driver installation is doing something quite surprising and non-standard.

I'm extremely curious about what other factors may have been at play in what happened. Please confirm whether the following sequence of events is accurate, since it's how I read your post:

1. AB V3.2 was working fine on your system with an active license.
2. You installed the wireless printer.
3. You launched AB again and it said your license needed to be reactivated for a new computer identity.

Is this correct? If so, how long of a time gap exited between each of these steps? What other changes may have occurred on your system during those gaps? And what other software installations/updates occurred during those gaps?

I'm trying to understand what actually occurred here, since there is nothing in the way AB's licensing works that should be impacted by installing a new printer driver.

Thanks in advance for clarifications and filling in the details here.
 
Thanks for the reply, Rob
Your sequence is correct. AB 3.2 was working just fine the day before I installed my Epson workforce 600 wireless printer software. Now, that was an automatic install from a CD which went through a whole rigamarole of operations - ending with testing the wi-fi connection to the printer, etc. It was definitely a non-standard install, as EPSON drivers are known to be a little dodgy. It's conceivable to me that perhaps something in the network setup between my wireless network and laptop may have caused the problem... I'm not enough of an expert in these things to be able to diagnose it further!
Happy to be of any help I can.
 
Wow! I'm at a complete loss regarding what could have happened. Apparently, the Epson installer did something really weird, but I'm not sure what it might have been. Since the only way I can think of to investigate this is to obtain an Epson printer and install it, and since I don't know anyone with one of those printers, I'm going to chalk this up to an aberration. If someone else gets hit by this, we'll have to delve into it further.

Sorry for the hassle with this. I'm going to hope that Epson hasn't started doing something extremely weird that will cause problems for lots of folks. They did that with a new installer almost a decade ago, but they then fixed the installer, so the problem was short-lived. Ah, the joys of hardware companies where software developers are second class citizens and the attention paid to the software is commensurate with that status. :-(
 
me to....

this just happened to me to.. i upgraded a set of drivers on my laptop (video, wireless)
to be frank, i would expect a faster turnaround on things like this than days, you mentioned developers being treated like second class citizens, so are paying customers for software. i am away from my desktop so i cant run back to my other install, i understand that some these issues should not cause an ident change, but even if it did days is a bit much to have to wait to use software you own on the same computer its always ran on.

i love your product, but its a little annoying to have to wait to use a product you own due to driver upgrades.

UPDATE: great job on getting this taken care of. all fixed!
 
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We instituted a fast-response solution for problems with license reassignment issues awhile back. As long as the issue is reported using the new mechanism - which is automatically proposed for use when the problem is detected by the product - we can usually get this sorted out within a matter of hours. From your edit, it sounds like this is the method you used and everything got sorted out quickly.

Please note that this type of problem only occurs when the previous reassignment occurred less than four months earlier. For the vast majority of users, this confluence of conditions won't arise, so it's only a problem for a small number of users in the first place. And when it happens, we do our best to get folks running again in a timely manner. We're certainly not perfect, but we do a pretty good job.
 
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