[hschwemmer]

Dear Sir: For about 15 years now I have been satisfactorily using a financial application program called “Managing Your Money” originally sold by MEGA Software, LLC and more recently by H.& R. Block who subsequently discontinued the distribution and support of this product about 3 or 4 years ago. The software installation modules were originally distributed on 7 3 ½ inch floppy disks. The software has performed almost flawlessly through these years resulting in 15 years of all my financial records and transactions residing in the MYM data base located on my “C” drive. Being satisfied with the software, trusting it’s reliability and versatility I never had the desire to even look at another product. My # 1 concern at this time is the unavailability of a 3 ½ inch floppy drive on any PC I would most likely have to purchase in the next year or so which would leave me without my trusted MYM program. My question is: Is there any method available by which I could transfer the content of the 7 floppy disks to DVD’s or possibly even to a location on my external back-up disk drive - similar to the "Software Install" modules downloaded from PC World. I have unsuccessfully tried to just copy the Floppies to a DVD using the "NERO" Program. The “copy” worked OK but trying to install from the copied DVD failed. I would appreciate any help, guidance you could provide for me on this “problem” Thank You very much
Helmut Schwemmer

This post has been edited by mphenterprises: 03 October 2009 - 05:10 PM
Reason for edit: removed personal information

[JimH443]

hschwemmer, on 03 October 2009 - 01:44 PM, said:

Dear Sir: For about 15 years now I have been satisfactorily using a financial application program called “Managing Your Money” originally sold by MEGA Software, LLC and more recently by H.& R. Block who subsequently discontinued the distribution and support of this product about 3 or 4 years ago...

I admit up front that I am unfamiliar with this program.

You may be stuck having to find a 3.5" floppy drive. I think the motherboards continue to have the connector for them even though they're rarely used.

Since you were unable to install the program from a copy you had made, I'm guessing that the disks use some form of copy protection. While there often are ways to defeat this, with the decline in use of floppy drives they're becoming harder to find.

Look to see if MYM has any kind of "Export" option. If you can't find a way to install the program, using Export could allow the possibility of using your data in another program. I kinda doubt there is one though, but it's worth a look-see.

[backbuster]

You can still purchase floppy drives and instal it in your new comp. If your new comp doesn't have a floppy connector you can by floppy drives like this one that connects to a USB header. You can also buy external floppy drives that use USB.

[mphenterprises]

Hi hschwemmer and welcome to the PCWorld Communities.




Please be very careful about posting any personal information within a public forum. That includes phone numbers, addresses, and personal email addresses.

[rgreen4]

JimH443, on 03 October 2009 - 02:10 PM, said:

hschwemmer, on 03 October 2009 - 01:44 PM, said:

Dear Sir: For about 15 years now I have been satisfactorily using a financial application program called “Managing Your Money” originally sold by MEGA Software, LLC and more recently by H.& R. Block who subsequently discontinued the distribution and support of this product about 3 or 4 years ago...

I admit up front that I am unfamiliar with this program.

You may be stuck having to find a 3.5" floppy drive. I think the motherboards continue to have the connector for them even though they're rarely used.

Since you were unable to install the program from a copy you had made, I'm guessing that the disks use some form of copy protection. While there often are ways to defeat this, with the decline in use of floppy drives they're becoming harder to find.

Look to see if MYM has any kind of "Export" option. If you can't find a way to install the program, using Export could allow the possibility of using your data in another program. I kinda doubt there is one though, but it's worth a look-see.

Most current motherboards, even those in manufactured machines have the floppy port on the MB. If you are looking at a particular one, you can check the specifications on the manufacturers website and verify. HP still does on most if not all, and in their support sections of their website, show that in diagrams and photos of the MB.

However, the cases have no place to mount the floppy. Most aftermarket cases do, so an option may be to move the components to a new case. I did that, not for a floppy, but to get more room for hard drives.

Hschwemmer - You may have a more severe problem. Most of the new machines currently come with Vista and in slightly more that two weeks will come with Windows 7. Will your no longer supported program run under either Vista or Windows 7?

I can emphasize as I have over 20 years of financial data in Quicken. Over the years what was simply a check register like database has become a repository for all of my current financial data. However, to avoid having 20 years of data in one file, I have broken the files up in 5 year blocks, and at the end of a 5 year block (typically after the end of the following quarter) I save the file with the new name and clean the file of all transactions predating that Jan 1. (In the current case 2006).

Quicken however, offers only the ability to export the financial data via a Quicken readable format to another Quicken file. I suspect yours may have a similar problem. It does offer the ability to export a report to a text file that can then be imported into Excel.

You may have to do what I do when getting a new machine, especially one that has a new operating system, and that is to keep the old machine running on it's own for a while (years in some cases) to run the old incompatible programs while I transition to the new programs on the new machine.

There are only two currently supported financial management systems that I am familiar with - Quicken and Microsoft Money. I had occasion around the first of the year to attempt to help a friends mother move info from the 2003 version of MM to Quicken and could find no quick way. We decided not to even try when we discovered that her MM version would run just fine under Vista. The only drawback we found was that the internal backup process was hard coded to a floppy drive, which I was able to provide for her (custom built machine).<br><br>Apparently Microsoft has pulled the plug on Money and is no longer selling it. There is an announcement on their website to this effect and an announcement on the Quicken website that they are working on a conversion file for Money data files. In addition to the local PC based version, Quicken also offers an online version and apparently some others do as well, but putting data online is not something I can recommend.<br>

This post has been edited by rgreen4: 03 October 2009 - 08:03 PM
Reason for edit: Microsoft Money Update

[mcbarker]

hschwemmer, on 03 October 2009 - 01:44 PM, said:

Dear Sir: For about 15 years now I have been satisfactorily using a financial application program called “Managing Your Money” originally sold by MEGA Software, LLC and more recently by H.& R. Block who subsequently discontinued the distribution and support of this product about 3 or 4 years ago. The software installation modules were originally distributed on 7 3 ½ inch floppy disks. The software has performed almost flawlessly through these years resulting in 15 years of all my financial records and transactions residing in the MYM data base located on my “C” drive. Being satisfied with the software, trusting it’s reliability and versatility I never had the desire to even look at another product. My # 1 concern at this time is the unavailability of a 3 ½ inch floppy drive on any PC I would most likely have to purchase in the next year or so which would leave me without my trusted MYM program. My question is: Is there any method available by which I could transfer the content of the 7 floppy disks to DVD’s or possibly even to a location on my external back-up disk drive - similar to the "Software Install" modules downloaded from PC World. I have unsuccessfully tried to just copy the Floppies to a DVD using the "NERO" Program. The “copy” worked OK but trying to install from the copied DVD failed. I would appreciate any help, guidance you could provide for me on this “problem” Thank You very much
Helmut Schwemmer

As the others have mentioned, you can still buy a 3.5" floppy drive. I think Dell still offers installing one as an option on some of their systems. Probably the reason you can't install from a DVD is that the install program is coded to look for the A: drive, and stops dead when it can't find it. As rgreen4 mentioned, newer operating systems might have trouble running the program if you do manage to install it, although Windows 7 allows you to run programs in compatibility mode back as far as Windows 95. Good luck.

By the way, I believe that MS has discontinued selling their Microsoft Money program, which would seem to leave Quicken as the only other option.

[Slik]

Many suppliers (including for example, Toshiba) sell excellent USB 2.0 (backwards compatible to USB 1.1) external floppy drives. The last one I bought cost me about $40.00 USD, about 3 years ago. Another potential problem might be the difficulty in finding the unused floppy discs themselves. I usually buy them in packs of 50 or 100.

I just checked. NewEgg.com has a USB FDD for $19.00. Another alternative would be to use a USB thumb drive. I just bought a 4GByte SanDisk Cruzer thumbdrive at Radio Shack for $18.00.

This post has been edited by Slik: 05 October 2009 - 07:01 PM

[LincolnSpector]

rgreen4, on 03 October 2009 - 06:48 PM, said:

Quicken however, offers only the ability to export the financial data via a Quicken readable format to another Quicken file.<br>

Hi. Sorry I'm coming to this conversation a little late.

What you're saying about Quicken isn't quite true. While you can't convert an entire Quicken data file to another format, you can create a report with vasts amount of data, and convert that. I've tested the following in Quicken 2007 & 2009:

Select Reports, then EasyAnswer. In Reports & Graphs dialog box, click How much did I pay to...?

Don't worry about the settings. Click Show Report.

Once report is up, click Customize icon in upper-right corner.

In Customize Payee dialog box, for Date range, select Include all dates. Then click Payees tab. Click Mark All button, then OK.

You'll get a list of all your exisitng transactions. Select Export Data**Copy Report to Clipboard. Wait until hour glass disappears.

Go to spreadsheet program, press CTRL-V.

Or select Export Data**Report to Excel Compatible Format. Actually produces a space-delimited .txt file.

Can also export to pdf from there.

Lincln