The four stages of software upgrade grief
A failed Adobe CS4 upgrade leads one reader on a long, discouraging road to recovery
Follow @infoworldSometimes what starts out as a fun upgrade to improved tools can turn into an emotional roller coaster for no apparent reason. First, you get one error message, and then another. There's a call to tech support, as well as the up-and-down ride of hope and apathy. Frustration, despair, apathy, and intervention -- it's happened to all of us. Eventually you decide to cut your losses.
Jan was already at the end of this cycle with Adobe by the time she wrote to the Gripe Line. After a seemingly simple purchase of Adobe CS4, she was at wit's end, trying to make up for lost work and despairing the thought of ever reaching a satisfactory resolution.
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"In April, the charity where I work as IT manager purchased two copies of Adobe CS4," Jan says. As it turns out this was an ill-timed acquisition -- a few days later, Adobe announced the release of CS5.
"We are a nonprofit and our license does not entitle us to upgrades. So we decided the simplest solution was to use this, now older, version," explains Jan.
The catch -- a major one, at that: The software wouldn't work. In fact, for the most part, it wouldn't even install. What it did do was eat up the company's limited time and resources.
"We downloaded it multiple times to multiple computers," she explains. "Every single download was corrupt and ended with an error message that read, 'A problem has occurred with the archive. Please try downloading again.'"
Jan asked several of the nonprofit's staff to download it from their home computers in case the problem was with her firewall or security, but the results were identical. In one or two cases, the software got past the error message and asked for a serial number, but none of the serial numbers Adobe gave her worked. She got new numbers from Adobe; they didn't work either. She tried to work with Adobe's technical support before she gave up and wrote to the Gripe Line.
"We opened trouble tickets only to have Adobe close them as resolved when nothing had been done," she explained. "My staff spent many three-hour shifts on the phone with technical support but got no resolution."
