Giveaway of the Day Forums » Installation and activation problems

1. PromoGuy
   Member

   I noticed that if you install and activate an Alawar Game in XP, and you have other logins/profiles/users on your machine, the game won't be activated for them. Instead, it will open as a trial/demo.

   If your children have their own profiles, and you install and activate under your account, you will need to log in as them, and run Activate.exe. Otherwise, they won't be able to play as a registered user.

   I learned this the hard way with Pac-Mania 3. Thought it was worth mentioning.

   Maybe this fact could be included in the Readme.txt for Alawar games.

   Posted 1 year ago #

2. tjchan
   Member

   Thanks. I'll be adding this thought in the FAQ I'm writing up.

   Posted 1 year ago #

3. Bonnie
   Member

   Although I don't have this problem (we have two computers networked and my husband downloads his own GGotD goodies), have you tried installing the game in a shared folder? It may work for multiple users of a game on the same machine. We used to share one until recently and when my husband downloaded something he thought I should use (ie Crap Cleaner), he put it there for me to then move to my side. I imaging you could create a Shared Games folder to simplify downloading, then retrieve a copy to each profile.

   This would be helpful to grown-up folks who share a computer but don't have parental control rights.

   Hopefully your solution has worked for your kids. Good luck!

   Posted 1 year ago #

4. spiegelj2007
   Member

   thire is one poroblem with that if your running xp pro all the accounts would haveto be adminitrator accounts to run the activate.exe file

   (PromoGuy
   Member
   I noticed that if you install and activate an Alawar Game in XP, and you have other logins/profiles/users on your machine, the game won't be activated for them. Instead, it will open as a trial/demo.

   If your children have their own profiles, and you install and activate under your account, you will need to log in as them, and run Activate.exe. Otherwise, they won't be able to play as a registered user.

   I learned this the hard way with Pac-Mania 3. Thought it was worth mentioning.

   Maybe this fact could be included in the Readme.txt for Alawar games.)

   Posted 1 year ago #

5. BuBBy
   Administrator

   Actually normally it will depend which hive in the registry the program writes the registration key.

   If it uses HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE then this is visible for all users on the PC - but you would normally need to have administrator rights to edit this.

   If it uses HKEY_CURRENT_USER - this applies only to the user who is logged in (the current user) - but the user doesn't need administrative rights.

   So If HKLM is used - you only need to write to it once, with an administrator account and all users could use the key.

   If HKCU is used - admin permissions are not an issue - but you would need to activate for each user account on the PC who will use the software.

   So, you don't actually need everyone to have admin - just one account - and if that doesn't work - you need to activate for each account - but they won't need administrator. As I said - which method to use will depend on each separate program.

   Posted 1 year ago # | Login to Send PM

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