Replacement dongle

[dgon64]

My USB dongle died last week and Newtek with its usual efficiency sent me a replacement dongle which I received this morning and I'm up and running again but I do have one problem which I'm hoping someone has had experience with. I had LWCAD 2.5 installed and it worked fine with my previous dongle but now it will not activate. I notice that I have a new hardware ID being recognized by LWCAD and I guess the problem might be that LWCAD is tied to my old dongle. I've e-mailed WTools3D but while I wait for a response I just thought I'd ask to see if anyone could confirm my suspicions about the dongle tie-in.
One other thing I thought I'd mention is that I have LW9 installed on two computers, one is an HP laptop running Vista Ultimate and XP32 and the other is a desktop running XP64. Installation of the new license keys went fine on XP32 and XP64 but when I tried to register the new license key on Vista 64, the make license utlity LS would not work and I kept ending up in Discovery Mode. I tried using both the registration utility and the enter license option from the Help tab from within Layout to no avail. Since it already worked in XP64, I finally got it to work by copying and pasting the 2 license files from XP64 to Vista 64-a bit frustrating but I had noticed that some others had had a problem ( not exactly the same one ) installing on Vista. Just thought I'd mention my problem and solution although I realize my problem might be unique and my solution would only help someone with LW9 installed on Vista 64 and XP64. BTW I have the latest Sentinel drivers so I don't think that was the problem.

[jcaesar]

I've gone through this myself with many of the plugin vendors, from SKStudios, Worley, and so on, when I moved from parallel to USB. Each vendor is different. Some have the ability to switch the dongle on their webpage (i.e. the hardware ID), others require you to mail in, fax, or scan/e-mail a copy of the receipt Newtek sends you with the dongle.

They'll either trust this sheet directly, or be able to confirm with Newtek that you are replacing the dongle, and not buying another copy of LW (which would require a new license for your plugs). So yes, the issue is exactly as you describe.

Nearly all of the vendors had responded to me within a reasonable time frame (1 or 2 days max in most cases). A few have taken much longer than that, and usually those have been the more "independent/freelance" plugin writers.

J

[BeeVee]

For the problem with the license.key in Vista 64 I'm prepared to bet that it is down to UAC not allowing LightWave to write to the file. I think the easiest way to resolve the situation is to turn UAC off. You can turn it back on once the file has been written if the machine is in use by several people, if not (and you know what you are doing) you could always leave it off.

For the Lock ID, what jcaesar says (ave mighty Caesar!) is right. Dongles cannot share Lock IDs, which means that any commercial plug-in you own will cease to work. Contacting the plugin author is the only way to get them working again and most are extremely responsive.

B

[dgon64]

Thanks for the replies jcaesar and BeeVee-I figured that the hardware ID was tied to the software so now I'll just be patient and hope to get a response from the vendor quickly. As to the UAC in Vista, I never even thought about that but I can see what you mean. I guess another software suprise from Vista that we have to get use to.

[dgon64]

Just wanted to publicly thank Victor from WTools3D for his quick and professional response to my problem. He sent me a new key for LWCAD in less than a day and I'm up and running again. Also, thanks again to the Newtek tech support as I was suffering withdrawal symptons for the few days that I was without use of LW. I'm all better now-cheers!