curious: what stops you from deleting all app files and redownloading a trial?

[swindmill]

I just finished up a 10 day trial with Bluephone Elite, and I liked it, but didn't want to buy it right now, so I thought I might be able to delete all the files pertaining to it and download it again for another trial. This clearly doesn't work, but I was wondering why. I don't necessarily need another trial with the app, I'm just curious as to how/where such records are kept.

 

[YS2003]

Maybe a few crums of files are left over. If you have Tiger, you should be able to find all the files associated with that program via Spotlight.

As far as installing, deleting, re-installing, and etc, I think it is not good for the hard drive. Possible fragmentation, donwload errors, and etc.

 

[Blue Velvet]

I suspect it's some invisible file at root level of the drive... once, I managed to extend a trial of Adobe CS for 4 months by reinstalling it on different partitions and drives with no problem at all.

 

[plinden]

Installing the trial adds stuff to the registry ... oops, wrong OS.

 

[swindmill]

I deleted everything I could find with spotlight. I guess it must be an invisible file. Is there any way to find them?

 

[panphage]

cd /
ls -al | grep foo

For the root directory anyway, where "foo" is your search key. Or just ls -al / | grep foo
And I think you can get a recursive search with ls -al /* | grep foo but I'm not sure exactly how well this will work.

 

[cube]

cd /
ls -al | grep foo

For the root directory anyway, where "foo" is your search key. Or just ls -al / | grep foo
And I think you can get a recursive search with ls -al /* | grep foo but I'm not sure exactly how well this will work.

find / \( -name '*somepattern*' \) -print;

 

[yellow]

If the developers are worth their salt at all, they won't name the file anything that relates to the software in question.

For example..

yellow% file ~/Library/Preferences/.wp259cb4e7
/Users/yellow/Library/Preferences/.wp259cb4e7: data

What the hell is this? I'm pretty sure it's my Snapz Pro license.. But there's no indicator that it belongs to Snapz Pro. See what I'm getting at?

If you like the software and want to use it.. buy it. These people pour their lives into making this software and trying to continue using it for free is just lame.

 

[swindmill]

If you like the software and want to use it.. buy it. These people pour their lives into making this software and trying to continue using it for free is just lame.

The main point of my post was to figure out how this stuff works. I like to understand why things work the way they do. I tried to start another trial because I'm not ready to buy it. It didn't work, and I wondered why this was so, out of curiosity. I'm really not all that concerned with getting the trial to work again, I'll probably buy a license in the next few weeks.

Now I have a better idea of how this works, and I'm satisfied. Character attacks, especially when based upon assumptions, are lame.

 

[yellow]

Now I have a better idea of how this works, and I'm satisfied. Character attacks, especially when based upon assumptions, are lame.

Just working with what info we were given.