Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

Now that my taxes are behind me (though the debit of cash by the federal and state government hasn't happened yet)....I thought that today might be a good day to finally upgrade to Microsoft Money Plus Deluxe.

It wasn't.

I wasn't sure how to proceed, do I need to uninstall the old version first. Could not uninstall it....after trying to find the answer online. I gave up and launched the installation.

It detected the old version and wanted to remove it. I decided to let it do so, and it then installed.

Starting it for the first time, it wanted to update...only it would download and then beep. After that all subsequent starts...it would also want to update, but it would say that update is already in progress and to wait....and wait....and wait.

I tried rebooting

Tried new google searches

I checked permissions

More reboots.

Tried saying no first, activating and upgrading my old MS Money 2006 Deluxe file first. First Impression....at least they kept the same look at feel, but man it is using all my CPU and took 15 minutes before I finally got my home page.

Tried Safe Mode with Networking.

I tried a different google search...found something about DEP. Tried adding exceptions and tried again. Still no go. Read some more, turned out to add exceptions I was turning up my DEP setting.

Still no luck. I then peeked into the MNYCore.NEW.* folder....saw a daupdate.exe.cab, unpacked and tried having it use that. No luck.

Then I took the big one...I copied all the files from MNYCore.NEW.* over to MNYCore....and tried daupdate.exe again. This time the update said it had completed successfully. This time Money Plus did start without prompting for an update. But, it is now consuming all my CPU and I'm still waiting to see the home page, or any sign of response....it won't even come back into the foreground.

The problem that makes this worse, is that the Microsoft Money 2006 CD went missing when I moved here....so I can't easily go back

Follow up:

After about an hour...I finally did see the home page and things seemed to work. Since I had been using Microsoft Money since 1997, without archiving anything....I had heard that doing so might be why it has been getting steadily slower and slower since I first start with Microsoft Money 98.

So I picked a date and archived part of it. The problem was trying to decide on when I should archive from. Just the other day I made use of going through my history deep to find things.

Anyways, I decided to archive stuff older than 5 years.

It didn't help.

I started doing more google searches. I tried running salvage on the file. No help.

Found something about deleting my budget (since I never stick to it)....I tried it. No help.

Finally, I saw information on "Remove all Bills Data"...seemed like a strange thing to do, but it seemed to work for some people. So I tried it.

Presto. Things are reasonable....

Sure was tedious reentering all my bills. The hard one was figuring how to reschedule my mortgage payments (answer: add it to my debt planner, let that create the payments, then remove it but don't remove the scheduled payments...it reverts the scheduled payments the mortgage amortization).

I put DEP back to its original settings and reenabled the budget....tried simple....for now. Very clearly I don't follow the simple budget. Since I have a mandatory pension and try to max my ROTH IRA every year. So, according to it, I'm saving more than I should for retirement. Also my committed expenses are higher....but I went higher than I should've with the size of my mortgage. But, it is a 30 year fixed, rather than a subprime mortgage...so a little pain now...

I see Microsoft Money has an Insight tray app now. I had missed the tray app of previous releases, which disappeared when I got 2006. Though it seems to only view information, not a shortcut for entering transactions without having to load the whole thing. So, I guess I'll turn that off....

While I was reentering bills, I did notice some of my preferences were lost...but at least it was a major relearning effort that previous upgrades brought.