In case anyone’s interested, here’s my recent experience on resetting the PL 2 activation counter in preparation for moving PL 2 to an OS that I can also run PL 3 on.
It was easier said than done. At least, it was not as easy as the last time I needed this. (Maybe a year ago.)
The first answer from support was that it was done, but it clearly wasn’t since I didn’t need to reactivate when starting Photolab. (Which I did to test that anything had actually been done.)
The second answer was that they’d just added some activations. How many I asked, since I needed three to more all of my activations, but no response.
After some prodding, the next answer was that they couldn’t reset the activation counter at all without knowing the machine id’s in question, which then became mac addresses, and I would also need to confirm that Photolab had been removed from all the disks in question. That this is a completely meaningless requirement - (a) I have images of my boot disks that go back several years, many of which contain an activated Photolab, and can undo the formal requirement directly after fulfilling it; (b) I can lie - was of no matter: policy is policy.
They could usually make an exception in case of theft or fire though, but that didn’t generate any feelings of gratitude at this point.
Eventually they did reset the activations, but it took over 24 hours to get it done. Just to be able to reinstall/activate Photolab on new disks.
I think this is pretty poor. Of all the commercial software I own (not a huge amount, Photolab, C1, Exposure, Affinity Photo, some older Adobe, and a few more), Photolab is the only one that requires me to contact a human at all for this kind of thing. Literally everything else either has activation/deactivation functionality built into the software (C1, Exposure), liberal licenses (Affinity Photo), or some other method that doesn’t depend on a human during business hours. Even Adobe’s chat has been more efficient the few times I’ve used them, which is saying something.