unofficial microsoft.public.money FAQ and A
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Support Issues

Q) What's the worst thing that happens if I don't buy a Money version upgrade?

A) If you want to stick with an orphaned version of Money and pass on one or several upgrades, there are some known issues as well as some speculative ones you must consider:

The known issues:
- Support for older versions ends sooner.
- Services including transaction and quote download end sooner.
- Older versions will get "unsupported" sooner by FIs and so forth. "Unsupported" may just mean "don't call us if something goes wrong" or it may mean a change in interfaces that the old Money version can't deal with.
- Newly discovered issues will not get fixed. Not that they fixed old issues when the version was still current, but as you continue to use an old version, the odds of finding a new issue don't drop to 0.
- Changes in tax law will not get reflected in things like the Tax Estimator and the categories available for Investment Activity.

The speculative issues:
- If an upgrade comes out that is compelling, data upgrades may be more problematic depending on how far back-level your data is. Based on M05, the odds for a compelling upgrade seem low unless something radically changes how Microsoft views the product and the market. Indeed, M06/7 can't import M98 files directly. (See "I just installed M06, it refuses to upgrade my M98 [or 99 or ???] version file. Why? What do I do?" for more on this.)
- The "learning curve" for such an upgrade grows as a function of the number of versions you are jumping.
- As the version in use becomes further back-level, the odds that an OS or other application/driver upgrade irretrievably breaks it increase. Your copy of M04 may not work on Windows2012 (or with IE 7, for that matter).
- You may not be able to re-install and update your old version with all the patches on a new machine or in case of a hard disk reload or replacement. This is one of the scariest issues in that there have been reports of problems restoring Money data file from backups if a new installation of the same version of Money doesn't have the same service fixes installed. This is because Microsoft has a) only made updates for Money available via the Money Internet Update integrated install--i.e., no patch file to download and store away, and b) routinely disappeared updates for old versions. Microsoft's push to sell Money as a download without CD and with most of the program downloaded through some internal protocol only makes this worse--you may not even have a way to install the basic application, much less the patches.

The implication of this latter issue is that there may be **no way** for a user to install a usable/working/updated copy of your **fully-licensed** but obsolete version of Money on a new machine or a reloaded hard disk after the point where Microsoft withdraws support and disappears the Internet Updates. In the case of, say, replacing a failed hard disk, there may be no way for you to get to the point of being able to restore a working good backup of your Money data short of buying a newer version of Money and hoping that it can restore/upgrade this backup.

Microsoft really should provide the product updates some alternate way where the patch file is downloadable from Microsoft Downloads just like patches for normal Microsoft products. If Microsoft did that, the onus would still be on the user to download and save the patch indefinitely--but that would be better than today's case where there is nothing the user can do to protect against this risk.

References:
Microsoft Downloads site

Please see this disclaimer if you are using Money 2005 or this comment if you are using Money 2006.

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