Mrs E’s taking the RMA box to the UPS joint after work today, and the Amazon seller in question (RetroSoftware) got back to me a few minutes ago. My hunch about it being an innocent mistake on their part is reinforced even further by their response. They were incredibly nice about it all.

They’re aware of the Chinese/Singaporean bootlegs on the market, and they actually do have a routine for spot checking and discarding bogus inventory. Unfortunately, the batch of CS5 Extended they got from one of their reputable suppliers came during a location move and accidentally made it onto the shelves. They’ve pulled all of their remaining inventory of CS5 Extended off Amazon for double-checking.

They’ve offered to source the real thing and honor the original $699 deal, even if it means a loss for them. I appreciate the offer, but I won’t be taking them up on it. My inner businessman thinks they’ve lost enough money already, and my inner customer is pretty much in the “once bitten, twice shy” camp. I’m going to send them a nice thank-you note in response and consider all this a lesson learned.

Surprise of the day: Turns out that I don’t actually own Photoshop CS5 Extended, after all. What I bought was a very slickly packaged counterfeit with an invalid serial number. I’m talking the whole nine yards–box, inserts, shrink-wrap, stickers, everything. Normally, those people just flog the bootlegs at an obviously too-good-to-be-true price without going to all that bother, but this was packaged professionally and priced high enough to fool me. I’m normally good at spotting fishy deals from a mile off, but this one just reeled me in hook, line, and sinker. 

First, it was sold on Amazon, which is a place that I trust and have had a comfortable relationship with for years. Second, it was advertised as the full boxed deal, with none of the alarm-bells language that peg it as a fishy deal. Third, it was priced at $699.00, which is $300 less than full retail, but much higher than those fishy deals normally go for. Fourth, it wasn’t just sold by a marketplace reseller, this was one of those Fulfilled By Amazon products where Amazon itself handles warehousing and shipping. You wouldn’t think a bootlegger would go that far. Fifth, the seller had a good reputation and lots of positive feedback. Finally, my new notebook didn’t arrive until almost a week after the software did, so the unopened box was sitting on my desk the whole time and completely passed muster with me visually.

Well played, Mr. Counterfeiter. You got me good, you sly dog.

So, anyway, I found this out when installing it on my new notebook. There’s a step in the installer where you enter the serial number, and that’s when I found out the serial was no good. I got in touch with Adobe because I figured it had to be a glitch in their activation system and that this was all just one big misunderstanding that they could fix with the press of a button, and after that, we could all look up at the ceiling and laugh as the credits start rolling. 

Uh, yeah, no. That would be way too easy.

Adobe’s got this sort of semi-understandable “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. We apologize for the inconvenience. Sucks to be you. Next time, buy from us. For now, we suggest you contact the seller for a valid serial number.” sort of attitude towards the whole thing, but they did open a support case and requested that I send in some documentation. 

I did that, not because I expected them to make it right, but because I’m hoping that it’ll add one more piece of straw to the camel’s back–eventually, Adobe is gonna snap and go all Raving Rabbid on somebody’s ass for pirating their stuff. Heck, three people in New York got 5 years in the slammer for flogging bootleg Adobe software a while back, so apparently Costco quantities of bitching does have an effect. Alone, we are ineffectual whispers in the desolate wasteland, but united, we are a mighty hive whose earth-shaking bellows of righteous rage make Adobe’s eardrums meet in the middle of its collective head! Rah-rah-rah, up with the proletariat, fishcakes, blah blah, yadda yadda, et cetera.

I called the Amazon seller (RetroSoftware) twice today, and got the runaround both times, so I decided to just use their website customer support contact form to inform them that the software they sold me was bogus. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt–they liquidate old boxed software, and it’s very probable that they’re a 100% legit operation that just happened to get some bad inventory. The comparatively high price of $699 speaks to it being an innocent mistake on their part–most bootleggers tend to go for volume with scams, so they don’t charge anywhere near MSRP. Near as I can figure, RetroSoftware probably acquired the bootleg stuff through normal liquidation channels and simply assumed it was real. (The packaging fooled me too, so I can’t say they should’ve known better!)

I talked to Amazon customer support a little while ago, and they were really helpful and understanding. They’ve given me a return merchandise authorization form and a shipping label, and they’ll issue me a refund once they receive and process the return. We’ll see how that goes. It’s all boxed up and waiting for a trip to the UPS store tomorrow.

I’ll post an update as things develop.

My new notebook arrived yesterday, but I didn’t really have a lot of time to play with it. It arrived pretty late in the day, I had work to do after it showed up, updating new machines usually takes hours, and I had to get to bed early.

It’s a midrange Dell XPS 15 with a second-generation Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a nVidia GeForce GT540M GPU with 2 whole gigs of video memory all to itself.

To stay under budget, I only maxed out the components that I couldn’t upgrade myself later on (the GPU and video RAM). It ships with 4GB of RAM, I plan to upgrade that to 8GB when we’re a bit more financially healthy. The processor is also upgradable, and the cheapest Core i5 option was still a huge improvement over what I had in my old workstation, so I didn’t max that out either.

Anyway, I’ve been loading my work software on it for the past hour or two, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to see how it handled. On my old notebook, rendering stuff took a pretty long time. Only one tile (a 128×128 square portion of the rendered image) is processed at a time. The new notebook renders four tiles simultaneously (2 cores x 2 execution threads each), and it powered through a 2400×1800 box art render in 1 minute and 19 seconds. It’s just nuts, and it left me feeling a little light-headed and dizzy.

It also handles much larger textures during realtime rendering–4096x4096px using the default Intel HD Graphics 3000, and up to 16384x16384px if the GeForce GT540M is used instead. That’s really good, because it means I can work on large paper models at full print resolution. Really large ones.

What little I’ve seen so far impresses me. Compared to my old desktop workstation, the new notebook is a monster.