How to activate 21.x in Windows 7 (Not able to connect to server FIX)

Dear community,

i have been struggling with this, so i want to share my insights with you.

My PC was not able to connect to the server to do the activation. This post is supposed to help you activate the 21 version on a win 7 machine, even though it is not officially supported. But even with the 20 version, which should be supported, i was having the same issues.

As far as I can tell, there are 2 main issues that are common - DNS issues with reaching activation.phaseone.com and protocol issues, because Capture One is using the TLS 1.2 protocol which is not automatically enabled on Windows 7. To tell which issue you are experiencing, follow these steps:

First of all, whitelist Capture One in your firewall.

Second, check if you can reach https://activation.phaseone.com/Errors/ServiceStatus.aspx

if it is possible and you see that the servers of phaseone are up,

try to ping activation.phaseone.com via command line as described in this article.There is also some steps which might help you if you can not reach the servers, but i did not experience this issue - maybe you can contribute links to the solutions here.

if this works too, you know that it has very likely nothing to do with your DNS Provider. (there is an interesting article from 2016 in German about how Cloudflare lists activation.phaseone.com as malware site and blocks every request)

if you click "offline registration", then click on the online tab, enter your license code and your email, click on the "profile" button -> then there should be red error messages. Click "Run Diagnostics":

Then check if your error report looks about like this (here is mine):

Check 01: Success
Check 02: BFEBFBFF000506E3 /
Check 03: 1381095832
Check 04: Exception: Die Anfrage wurde abgebrochen: Es konnte kein geschützter SSL/TLS-Kanal erstellt werden..
Check 05: Exception: Die Anfrage wurde abgebrochen: Es konnte kein geschützter SSL/TLS-Kanal erstellt werden..
Check 06: success

check 04 and 05 are the important ones. (pls dont mind the german)

If you have DNS issues, then 04 and 05 will display "remote name could not be resolved". Thats issue is described in this FAQ: https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004318817-Unable-to-reach-the-activation-server

in my case, it displayed "could not create SSL/TLS secure channel".

this is when this article will give you the solution: https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360014239757--Could-not-create-SSL-TLS-secure-channel-activation-error-on-Windows-7

in my case creating the TLS 1.2 entries in the registry editor helped and after restart a very charming green checkbox appeared when in entered my email address (instead of an annoying red error)

wishing you luck with your activation!

L