registering twice

[chris kenny]

i have put office onto my mac g4 and recently on my children's ibook,
I registered them under slightly different names and now my office
software says it's registered to my kids' name and quits instantly.
Have i done something incredibly stupid? what can I do about it? Can I
re-register my kids' ibook to my name somehow and rectify the
situation?
thanks in advance
Chris

 

[JE McGimpsey]

i have put office onto my mac g4 and recently on my children's ibook,
I registered them under slightly different names and now my office
software says it's registered to my kids' name and quits instantly.
Have i done something incredibly stupid? what can I do about it? Can I
re-register my kids' ibook to my name somehow and rectify the
situation?

The name you input when you installed Office doesn't really matter -
it's the Product ID number (which was generated from your CD key).
You'd see the message on your kids' machine if you had Office running
and they tried to start Office. You're seeing MacOffice's license
enforcement technique at work.

If you have a single regular license, I'm sure your intention is to use
your childrens' iBook yourself, since the license allows both a desktop
and a laptop for the "exclusive use" of the main license holder. (If you
have a student/teacher edition, you have three licenses anyway).

If you've applied update 10.1.2 from

Mactopia Downloads
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx

(you should apply the 10.1.4 and 10.1.5 updaters, too, then repair disk
permissions using the Disk utility in the Applications:Utilities
folder), you should be able to use office on either machine (but not
both at the same time).

If you want to use both at once, you'll need another license. To remove
the license information from an installed Office suite, see

http://www.mcgimpsey.com/macoffice/office/pid.html