The main reason this is in GQ is that I am looking for factual answers. As in, Can I install these programs and expect them to work, or are they out of support/ not going to work on my system.
These were purchased and given to me as gifts back in the day. I do have the Original disks, paperwork, boxes, sleeves and key codes for these.
Quicken Personal finances 2007 baisic
original os requirement is Windows 2000/2003/xp
And System Mechanic4 Professional for Windows xp/2000/me/98 and NT.
My current system OS is Win 7. I do have some older Pewters sitting around that did run xp, but most of them aren’t worth the hassle of reviving and are nothing more than paper weights. Maybe one running Vista.
So, would they be likely to even run on my system?
Will they want more $$ to bring it up to date?
Should I just shred them and clear out the space for something else?
If I should dump them, are there any free (Actually free, not free to try) programs you could point me to?
Thank you for any help you can give. I may also try some (really really old) cd games I have from back then, but I don’t know that I have all the keys to them. Most of them required you to use the disk in the drive while playing.
Install it and try it. Your odds are excellent. Four year old software is no big deal.
I have a dozen or so Win7 machines running Office XP (10 years old) with no ill effects (other than an inability to read the new “docx” format from 2007, but Microsoft has a FREE update to help with that).
I think Quicken for XP should work fine on Win7. You may not be able to get customer support at this point. Of course, it’s only worth installing if you’re going to actually use it for something, so whether it’s worthwhile keeping it really boils down to whether you want a personal finance program.
I’m not sure what “System Mechanic” is, but just from the title it sounds like some kind of optimizer for your OS. In which case, it is probably nearly useless for Win7. I’m not saying definitely, but unless I knew ahead of time there was something it did that I needed for Win7, I wouldn’t bother even finding out what it can do; I’d just toss it.
I might give Quicken a try then. As for the System Mechanic, it was my first try at an anti-virus. It gave me a one year sub to Panda anti-virus. It did a good job back then. It also has a suite of other things on this disk including a firewall, search and recover, system sheild and a drive scrubber which requires a 3.5 floppy drive as you install it on that to securely delete everything on your hard drive. Supposedly acceptable for use in Top Secret Govt and Military installations.
Quicken might make you upgrade because they change their downloading format every so often, and banks follow suit, so you can only download data in, say, 2010 format. I forget what the latest version is for downloading but I am pretty sure it’s after 2007.
Of course this means nothing if you don’t plan on downloading any data. You can enter data manually to your heart’s content! If nothing else you can use it “for free” now and see if you like it and if it’s something you’d like to use, and then do a seamless upgrade later if you want.
I would say it would be better to use Microsoft Security Essentials with Windows 7 rather than System Mechanic. It’s free, and does a good job of protection in my experience.
If you really want/need to make that software work, there may be tricks. I found, for example, MS Dynamics 9 would install on Win7 64-bit if the necessary MS .NET Framework was installed first. If it tried to install .NET from the install kit it failed. Also, some such sw needs 32-bit ODBC, and if you dig around (windows\syswow64, I think) you will find an odbc32 program that allows you to create 32-bit database connectors.
Basically, if it’s too technical to install straight from the install media, you’d better have a techie friend.
However, Google is always a good source - pick the keywords from error messages, etc. and see what others have found.
I am not really too worried about these, mostly just curious, maybe a little hoarder or ocd about throwing them out. Thanks for pointing out the x32 vs x64 thing, I do have like 2 usable and 3 paperweight computers that these could work on as far as that goes. I have zero incentive to pull them out to experiment. The computers that work are all x64, although I do have to bite my tongue a little to say they “work”. Constantly fixing things done by wife and children. The only one that hasn’t any problems (Knock on wood) is mine. Mostly cause I never get to turn it on any longer than to catch up with updates.
Doesn’t Win7 have an XP virtual machine built in for incompatible stuff?
And also, 32-bit versus 64-bit should matter much unless you have stuff like drivers. I think for stuff like Micrografx the issue isn’t 32-bit versus 64-bit; it probably wouldn’t run on 32-bit Windows 7, either.
as I really like my old micrografx program).