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You cannot work on your taxes on two different computers, say your desktop
and notebook, your home machine and work machine, etc.
You cannot prepare your taxes on your home machine then bring them to
another machine connected to a laser printer (i.e. at work) to print them.
If you change computers, you have to pay for another license for the new
computer to use the software.
If your hard disk crashes, or you change your hard disk for other reasons,
you have to pay for another license or convince Intuit to give you a new
activation code.
Disk to disk back-ups no longer work. A common method for backups is to do
an entire copy of a hard drive and rotate the copies. Since the activation
code is written to an area of the hard disk that the copy programs do not
copy, the back-up drives will not have the activation code.
Activation can be lost if you repartition your hard drive using products
such as Partition Magic
The activation process is buggy and the Intuit web site often does not have
useful answers to activation questions. Instead, the answer you get is: "The
cause of this situation and its solution are currently under investigation.
More information will be made available as it becomes known."
The way C-Dilla works is to write its activation information to an area of
the hard drive between the end of the Master Boot Record and before the
first sector of the first partition (sector 0). This is normally not a
problem because the space in sector 0 that is not used by the Master Boot
Record is also unused by the operating system because FDISK (the program
that creates disk partitions), always begins the first partition on a sector
boundary (sector 1). However, it is permissible for the partition to start
mid-sector, immediately after the Master Boot Record with no unused space at
all. There are in fact alternatives to FDISK that do exactly this. I don't
know if C-Dilla checks for this and decides that it can't be used on
machines with disk drives formatted in this manner or if it just writes over
this area (this would be very bad). This type of partitioning is rare, but
it does exist. I have also received e-mail stating that drives partitioned
and formatted with Maxtor's Maxblast software will not allow C-Dilla
activation. Maxblast adds some extra weird stuff to the Master Boot Record
sector, some sort of BIOS extensions called EZ-BIOS. This may be related to
allowing larger drives than the system BIOS supports to be used, I'm not
sure.
It is often the case that a taxpayer needs to file amended returns years
after they first file. It is very possible that the taxpayer will have a new
computer by the time the amended return needs to be filed. There are often
other reasons that you need to print out tax returns long after you file,
i.e. for a loan application, financial aid application, etc.

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