I have wrestled with this demon for weeks. I found 2019 desktop version is permanently dead, even if you have a complete, disk-image backup of your old machine to restore to your new machine. Even if 2019 worked on your old machine. TurboTax 2019 triggers a need to activate whenever it is installed on a new machine -- but Intuit has killed the 2019 servers, so it can not ever, will not ever, activate ever again. ðŸ˜
Anyone reading this have TurboTax 2019 desktop still working if you still have your old, machine it was originally installed and activated on? (I'd be surprised if it does still work now, but lucky you if it does). If you do, that machine is golden and the only way 2019 will run for you in the future.
For those with advanced experience with Windows machines, you can create a VM in Windows 11 Pro and install 2020-2024 on that VM, activate them (if you still have any of the 5 license uses left), and then remove the NIC from the VM and save the VM for future use -- never allowing it to connect to the Internet again (and clicking close or cancel if ever prompted to update). My hope is that this will keep 2020-2024 working in perpetuity for me as long as I have the VM. But who knows, maybe Intuit has a time-bomb that will insist on phoning home at some point in the future and then those versions will be dead in the water, too.
We may have thought we were buying desktop software with a perpetual license that would run indefinitely, but we were misled or the fine print was obscured enough that we didn't see this coming.
