- quote -

Alan,
I have updated every year for nine years and I'm OK with Money 2005 so
far. Only thing new for me is the constant update of my investments rather than
once a week manually in 2004. 2005 doesn't have many new bells and whistles and
you probably don't need to upgrade this year. This is PARTICULARLY true if you
do alot of uploading and downloading of data thru financial institutions. IMHO
the technology is still not all there yet and Money 2005 can mess you up. JMHO.
Steve

Cal Learner-- MVP wrote:
- quote -

Thanks for the tip. Since I have not actually returned it yet, I will
try that. I don't think I need a backup of the 2005 file though, because
I am back on 2004 and that is where I will stay if it does not work.

I can't say that my confidence is increased by a product that says, "I
am going to delete your data" and then does not do it. That just seems
perverse -- like the designers are malicious as well as incomprehensible.

As a former software development manager myself, I would never have
permitted an update procedure like this and to be fair, none of my staff
would have contemplated anything as bad.

Alan.

In microsoft.public.money, Alan van der Vyver wrote:

- quote -

That warned loss of transactions does not seem to occur in real
life. It is the "new" account that has theoretical deletion of
transactions, as far as I can tell.

Keep an extra backup in case you don't like the result, then go
ahead with the merge.

Hi!

Several months ago, a creeping corruption problem that caused me to
spend weeks manually reconstructing transactions, destroyed my
confidence in Money's ability to maintain my data.

When I tried to updgrade from Money 2004 to Money 2005, it insisted that
I disable bill pay and that it would re-enable it. Instead of
re-enabling bill pay on the same account, it created a new empty account
and attached bill pay to that. There is no obvious way to correct this
and the new help system is totally useless. In the few days I had Money
2005 I never found a single answer to a question in the help and I tried
to use it a lot, because I was struggling.

Microsoft support said this a known issue and is the way Money 2005 was
designed. They suggested I merge the old and new bank accounts, but
Money would only merge the old one into the new one and announced that
it had found transactions prior to some recent date in the old account
and would delete them for me. Great feature that! Naturally I declined.

Their next suggestion was that I export all the transactions from the
old account and import them into the new account, but if there were any
links to other accounts, such as transfers that occur with credit card
payments, these would be lost and have to be reconstructed manually.
This is what I encountered with the corruption and, with 10 years worth
of data, there is no way I am going through that again.

Support could offer no other options so, in may case anyway, there does
not seem to be any reasonable way to upgrade from 2004 to 2005.
Furthermore, MS support gave the impression that this was not only
common, but was by design. If so, the designers' decision is
incomprehensible.

The result is that I am back on Money 2004 and for the first time ever,
I am returning software.

It would be interesting to know if others are able to upgrade and if you
encountered this problem how you got around it.

regards,
Alan.