Adobe Creative Suite 2 is now free

Photoshop and many other Adobe applications are prohibitively expensive, but Adobe is giving away Creative Suite 2 (CS2) away for free. Adobe originally released CS2 back in 2005, almost 8 years ago. While the applications are old, they still work on modern operating systems including Windows 8, 7, Vista, and XP. Windows users may need to run the installer in “Compatibility Mode” to get it to work, although it worked immediately for me in Windows 8. Mac users will have to install Rosetta or have a PowerPC processor to run Creative Suite 2.

It’s a bit strange that Adobe chose to release such an old suite of applications for free. Dreamweaver will be hopelessly outdated and will only allow you to edit basic HTML. Users looking to simply view PDFs will be better off downloading the free Acrobat XI application. Be sure to check out our review of the most up to date Adobe suite, CS6.

Here’s a list of the programs included for free in CS2:

• Adobe Creative Suite CS2 (Standard)
• Acrobat 3D 1.0 (Windows)
• Acrobat 7.0 Standard
• Acrobat Pro 8.0
• Audition 3.0
• GoLive CS2
• Illustrator CS2
• InCopy CS2
• InDesign CS2
• Photoshop CS2
• Photoshop Elements 4.0/5.0
• Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0

To download the program, you’ll need an Adobe.com account, which you can register for free if you don’t already have one. If you want the entire suite, you’ll have to download all three discs individually. The download page for CS2 is currently down, no doubt due to people flooding the page. We’ll update this post as soon as the site comes back up.