Are you an engineer on the go and need to access your SOLIDWORKS software from your laptop as well as your workstation? Or perhaps your company requires licenses to be transferred often between machines? We have a couple of solutions to make it easier for you to access your standalone SOLIDWORKS license from more than one computer.

Inside SOLIDWORKS there is an Activate/Deactivate mechanism to release the license back into the server and allow the license to be accessed by another computer.  This is an easy, fast, and proven method that makes it easy to ensure compliance with your license usage and provides versatile access to your standalone SOLIDWORKS license across multiple computers.

How to Deactivate a License

1. From within SOLIDWORKS, go to the Help menu and select Deactivate Licenses
2. From the Deactivation screen that appears…
   1. Click the Select All button
   2. Ensure that an email has been entered in the E-Mail: box provided.
   3. Click Next
3. The system will then deactivate the license(s) from the machine. The system will confirm this by showing a window of currently activated products.  It should be empty.  Click Finish to complete the task.
   • SOLIDWORKS will then automatically close

How to Activate or Re-activate a License

1. Open SOLIDWORKS.
   1. If the licenses have been deactivated from that machine (or have never been activated), the SOLIDWORKS Product Activation window will automatically appear.
2. Select the option I want to activate my SOLIDWORKS product now and then click Next
3. From the Activate screen that appears…
   1. Click the Select All button
   2. Ensure that an email has been entered in the E-Mail: box provided.
   3. Click Next
4. The system will then activate the license(s) on the machine. The system will confirm this by showing a window of currently activated products.  It should list all products installed on the machine.  Click Finish to complete the task.
   • SOLIDWORKS will then automatically open.

The following video explains this process: https://solidworks.2winbridge.com/p/Stand-Alone-License-Transfer-2017.

If your company requires you to transfer licenses often, it can become a little time consuming to open SOLIDWORKS and run the activation or deactivation process over and over again. Not to worry, we have a workaround that can make this process a little easier. This can be achieved by running the Activation/Deactivation process outside of SOLIDWORKS.

Using an External Program to Activate and Deactivate Licenses

1. Navigate to the SOLIDWORKS installations folder (typically C:\Program Files\SOLIDWORKS or SOLIDWORKS Corp) and navigate down to the \setup\i386 folder
2. Find the executable swactwix.exe (not to be confused with swactwiz_s.exe) and create a shortcut of this file to the desktop (or pin it to the taskbar)
3. Repeat the above steps on all machines where license transfers are going to occur

Double click on the shortcut that was created. You will see the following window:

Select the 1st radio button to deactivate a license or the 2nd radio button to activate/reactive a license and then click Next.

> The remaining steps in the process are the same as the two sections titled “How to Deactivate a License” and “How to Activate or Re-activate a License” above.

Now you are free to enjoy the use of your standalone SOLIDWORKS license from the convenience of anywhere you choose.

Special thanks to our technical team, notably, Austin Dumas for all the technical details and images used in this blog!