Running Photoshop CS3 on Windows 2003

If you have ever tried to install Photoshop on a Windows Server machine you may have seen a warning that refuses to install on anything but Vista or XPsp2. I’m sure this is massively unsupported; But if you have a temporary need, its a passable solution:

  • Browse to: Adobe CS3\Photoshop\Adobe CS3\payloads\AdobePhotoshop10en_US_volume\AdobePhotoshop10en_US_volume.proxy.xml
  • Edit in notepad and find “Server2003”
  • Change “Server2003”:{“Exclude”:true} to “Server2003”:{“Require”:true}
  • Save the file
  • Re-run Setup.exe

You should now be able to install the software, I’m sure some things will work poorly, but this is the price you pay.