I have an academic license of SW 2019-2020, and I am having some problems with activation. As a veteran, I download the academic version every year and use it for personal projects.
I was running it in a virtual machine on my Mac, and additionally I installed it on another laptop only to initialize HSM Edit. I forgot all about that installation and that laptop was sold.
Last week I decided to install it in a workstation laptop, and naturally the allowed number of activations (2) were exceeded. I deactivated the license on my virtual machine, and then tried activating on the workstation, and now I can't activate it on ANY machine. I literally have zero machines with Solidworks running right now.
I contacted TriMech, who is listed as my VAR. They were very nice, and helped to deactivate any current activations, including on an ASUS laptop. I have never owned an ASUS machine!
However, it hasn't helped. I decided to wipe the hard drive of the workstation and start with a fresh Win10Pro install, and then install Solidworks, and I was able to open it with a 30-day grace period. HOWEVER, as soon as I entered my serial number the grace period disappeared, and since my serial has issues I'm screwed. I'd be happy to just get the grace period back, since I'm going to get 2020-2021 in a couple of weeks anyway.
1) How can I get my legitimate serial numbers to work on computers I have physically in front of me, and disable any activations on any other computer? Trimech said they did this but it wasn't successful - I think because some unknown person reactivated it on their machine before I had to chance to.
2) How can I get back to the 30-day grace period if nothing else works?
Like the sands of the hour glass so are the days of our lives.
Seems like you are done with free and will have purchase a seat. At least you did not purchase a premium seat that came with a laptop license. I did many years ago and Solidworks back peddled the deal. Its not a big deal if your box is connected to the internet. All our sensitive stuff is air gapped from the internet so it becomes a real pain to swap licenses. It appears they had intentions of bullying me into purchasing a second seat, did not happen...
Look around at some of the alternatives, that is what I am doing since I plan to retire in a couple of years. Cannot afford to keep it on maintenance after retirement or whomever buys my company will get the seat. Because if my machine craps out and needs swapped out to a newer machine I will be up the river without a license.