GX Developer losing license

[bob1371]

Hello, About 3 months ago we upgraded to GX Developer 8. We have 2 license, one on a engineer's laptop and another on a maintenance laptop. The engineer's laptop has lost license twice. Both times have to go thru deleting alot of things, calling with site code and getting new authorization. I was finishing up a 4 day project early this morning where I built a new panel and rewired a machine for future upgrades. I had already made all program changes and saved everything to hard drive and USB drive. I then shut down the computer. I later realized I needed to change a couple comments so I opened GX Developer and No License found. Lucky I was done with project as this being a holiday weekend I would have been screwed if this happened earlier. This machine had to be running third shift tonight so thankfully its done. Anyone else see this problem? I have spent about 3 hours on the phone working thru this on other computer and all they could suggest was to disable virus scanning of Melsec folder which we did on both computers. Any help or suggestions greatly appreciated. Bob

[mjrx]

Check with Mitsubishi. I think they completely revamped that licensing system. It has been a thorn in their side for awhile. It has happened to me with GX and E-Designer. I fear too I will be onsite somewhere when this occurs.

[panic mode]

Well, it happened to me (twice) and fortunately in both cases we ware able to bring one of the customer's maintenance guys who didn't go fishing. They ware able to bring their laptop and help me finish the job. In my case it happened with GT Works and I'm still so mad about it... Just call Mitsubishi, they are usually easy to communicate with. They issued me new codes over the phone. Once i couldn't get anyone on the phone because it was holiday in USA (working day here in Canada). They also don't have 24/7 line to handle this and you get hosed if this happens on a weekend. Even if they did, working on site often means no reliable phone access. For example on weekend hardly anyone is in the office so no land lines, cell phone coverage is not good inside plant, and once you leave plant and door shuts, you are out for good or have no way to power the phone which drains battery very fast when signal is weak etc. (this is quite common for plants in rural areas). Cannot run defragmenter anymore, must use floppy drive to move licence every time. This however at least allows me to defrag but it's real pain to backup and restore licence every time like this. I don't know if killing licence and getting kill number that could be used as licence on fresh install will work if application itself is corrupted by any means (bad HDD sector, infected by malware or else). Even if it can, I don't see such utility installed or on my install disk. They can email something like that but again - not much of a use on a stormy evening away from office with no internet access etc. Installing fresh normally gives you 15 days trial but how badly you want to format harddrive and loose everything? Manually deleting corrupted files and installing fresh doesn't work since installer finds that you used to have this thing installed before.... So far it works but I'm concerned it will bite me again and in worst possible moment. It is obvious that they made a huge leap from no protection at all to very restrictive protection, all without much consideration about many headackes this is going to create. Now I'm reluctant to upgrade anything because of this. My GX Developer is still version 7, don't know if other products will be affected. I sure hope they change something about the licencing. I'm not sure what the solution could be but I'm not happy what they have now.

[bob1371]

Thanks for the info. I will be on the phone with them again in a bit. Bob

[Colin Carpenter]

Interesting points you raise ..... I upgraded to IEC Developer V7 and the lastest E-Designer a couple of months ago, and here in the UK, there is absolutely no sign of any license protection. The CDs arrive in cases, you phone for a serial number and that's it. As far as I know, that serial number is always valid in the event of a re-install. I don't even think the new E_Designer even has a serial number, though I stand to be corrected on that. It's one of the reasons I've always preferred Mitsubishi to Allen Bradley ...... their approach to software upgrades was always so much more sensible and relaxed. It always seemed like their approach was to sell hardware rather make lots of money selling software, which, at the end of the day, could only be used to programme their hardware. Hope things aren't due to change dramatically over here .....

[Crossbow]

It was only in the US software. Piracy is of great concern in our industry, as it witnessed by most PLC vendors using some form of keydisk or encryption. MEAU has removed the Crypkey protection from their newer softwares and moved to a more stable protection system. So you won't be having those problems in the future. If the problem continuously repeats or no solution can be found, MEAU will most likely want to issue you a new copy of the software without the Crypkey wrapper.

[bob1371]

Got everything worked out and they are sending version 8.25. Should be here today. thanks again, Bob