Yes, it's good to remember and recognise the fact that we belong to a thoughtful software community, at both ends.
Points taken re. tech support, though - Sony know automatically who I am when I buy a new version or product - please extend this functionality to Support.

All the emails with serial number to all my software were gone, so I had to contact all these companies and verify my rights to get the programs re-installed. Many of these purchases go back 3 or 4 email addresses so it was hard to figure out how to be recognised.

That's why you get a free Yahoo and a free Google account, and anytime you get an e-mail with a serial number, activation number, etc., you forward it to your Yahoo and Google accounts.

Yahoo and Google are responsible for the backup, they have been reliable in the past, and they haven't had much in the way of security problems. On top of that, the price is right, and even if your house is flooded or earthquaked out of existence, you will still have that information available (to your next of kin if necessary :O).

Do not use Hotmail for this (or any other) purpose. It is a free service, but on top of frequent long outages, they have had major security breaches, including hackers in India finding that they could pull passwords for any account by logging in with just a long URL (that particular one has been fixed) and more.

What i do is create a .txt file in the same directory as the downloads and put in there my serial numbers, download links, etc. Then when i've got a complete set of current versions (Vegas 7, Acid 6, Sound Forge 8, DVDA 4) i burn all these to a CD. That way everything i need to reinstall is right there in one package. Of course, i started doing this many years ago long before SONY had the "My Software" page, but i still keep it up out of habit. Who knows ... i might have to do a reinstall someday while my internet connection is out, or while i'm at a remote location.

If i could wish for something more on that page, i'd like a comment box i could fill in. The Sound Forge, Vegas, and Noise Reduction licenses that my church owns are in my name on my software page. I forget which are whose. I imagine there are folks who have lots of licenses at schools or corporations and it would be handy if each license could be tagged with "HP workstation in Bob's cubicle", for example. Of course, i could keep track of that myself too, i suppose.

In a .txt file, easily. Kelly, it is a good idea to store the serials with the downloads. In my case, alas, the downloads folder went awol. It probably should not have been on C: in the first place.

What happened was that one morning Windows would not start. I did not try safe mode, but booted from an old win 98 SE diskette and ran Scandisk. Scandisk then started converting what must have been good files to garbage, filling up the disk entirely, telling me it had run out of space. I deleted the garbage and it just went on. Still don't know what went wrong originally.
Tor

"What i do is create a .txt file in the same directory as the downloads and put in there my serial numbers, download links, etc. "

Me too - I always do that and copy the info to the install CD / DVD too.

/Ulf

And hard copy of all my logins, passwords, and serial numbers.

I've yet to have my filing cabinet crash. :^)