ASTER terms of licensing and updating

There are different types of licenses for the ASTER program:

ASTER Pro-X license - a perpetual license where X is the number of seats:
- The license is perpetual license.
- You can increase the number of seats by activating additional Pro-X licenses but no more than 12 seats on one PC (see details below).
- License is transferable to other equipment after deactivation.
- Activation or transfer to another PC can only be done as a whole - partial activation on multiple computers is not supported.
ASTER Annual-X license - a license valid for 1 year, where X is the number of seats:
- It is an annual subscription. meaning that to continue using it after the expiration of 1 year, a new Pro or Annual-X license needs to be purchased and activated.
- You can increase the number of seats by activating additional Annual-X licenses but no more than 12 seats on one PC (see details below).
- License is transferable to other equipment after deactivation.
- Activation or transfer to another PC can only be done as a whole - partial activation on multiple computers is not supported.
- This type of license is only supported on version ASTER 2.51 and newer.

After activating the license key, it is tied to the HWID (Hardware ID) of the equipment, and this information is stored on the activation server. In the future, the license key can only be used on the PC where it was activated. To restore the license (for example, after reinstalling Windows without hardware changes), simply activate ASTER using the same key.

The HWID consists of the serial numbers of the HDD ¹⁾ and CPU. Any other equipment can be changed without losing the license.

License can be transferred to another equipment using the deactivation procedure. ²⁾

To increase the number of workplaces, you need to activate one or more Annual-X or Pro-X licenses on the PC. The number of added workplaces will be equal to the sum of the indexes in the license name, but not exceeding 12. For example, to create 8 workplaces, you need to activate one Pro-6 and one Pro-2 licenses.
Starting from version ASTER 2.51, to increase the number of workplaces, you can combine Pro-X and Annual-X licenses. For example, if you have Pro-3 and you want to have 5 workplaces for a year, you can purchase an annual license for 2 workplaces and simply activate it on ASTER and it will allow the 2.

You can also combine two annual licenses:
- If the licenses have a different number of workplaces, they are combined. For example, if you have activated an annual-3 license, then after activating an annual-2 license, you will be able to create up to 5 workplaces. When one of the license expires, you will still have the license whose validity period has not yet expired.
- If the licenses have the same number of workplaces (for example, two annual-2 licenses), when activating the second license, you will have a choice: you can either expand the number of workplaces (in this case, up to 4), or extend the validity period of the current license. In other words, the new validity period of the license will be 1 year + the remaining duration of the existing license, without expanding the number of workplaces.

¹⁾ HDD or SSD, on which Windows is installed (system disk).

²⁾ For example, on a new PC or for replacing HDD/CPU.