Introduction

Several issues and common questions related to the licensing of Number One Systems software are covered here.

Product Key Code

Most of our products are sold with a Product Key Code. For products with a normal installation procedure, this is always 16 characters long, 12 numbers and 4 letters. During the installation, the user is prompted for a name, company, and serial number, which is when this code should be entered. Some installation also request a customer ID. This is a five or six digit number which identifies your records on our database. You should find it either on the inside cover of the manual, or on the order paperwork ( or digital receipt) accompanying your software.

Please close other programs as far as possible before installation. Other programs can place unpredictable demands on your computer's resources, which occasionally will interfere with the installation. It's also very important that you have administrator rights during installation, as new entries are written to your registry. If these are not completed properly, the installation may fail, or the program malfunction.

Cost Options

Where the product key code is only ten digits long, the installation is rather different. You will need to install Easy-PC first, then go to [Settings], [Optional Features], and tick the box applicable to your new feature. When you click on [Apply], you'll be asked for this authorisation code. After enabling a new feature in this way, you must close Easy-PC and restart it again before the feature will become available.

Because of the way the information is stored in the registry, if you have Easy-PC cost options installed, installing Easy-PC (as long as it has sufficient permissions to update your system Registry) will preserve existing entries, but will not automatically 'migrate' these options forward to the new version, so you should keep a separate record of your cost options.

Installing new versions of software

In general any new version of our software can be installed 'over the top' of the existing version. Unless you have been issued a new Product Key Code, when prompted for the Product Key Code you should use the code you used to install the software the first time, this should still work for the new version. If you don't know this code, many of our products display the code on the [Help | About] screen.

Unfortunately when new versions of any software are installed, Microsoft do not remove the entries for previous versions from the 'Programs and Features dialogue.  If you attempt to remove any of these entries, you WILL uninstall the current version.  Even if you have installed it in a different location from the previous version, common registry entries will still be removed, so even if it still works there's a high chance of malfunction at some point.  With recent versions of Easy-PC (V23 onwards), [Help], [Support], [Configuration files] allows you to save a copy of all your important registry entries to file, so if you prefer to keep these entries tidy you can uninstall all old copies, install the latest one, then reinstate your registry preferences.