The Trouble With Software Upgrades

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "When software makers urge upgrades, it isn't always in users' best interest, the Wall Street Journal reports. Many upgrades bring advertising or other unwanted features; some iTunes users felt this way about a recent upgrade. But for many programs, downgrading can be a headache--Yahoo generally doesn't link to old versions of software, and Apple says iTunes can't be downgraded. Some websites can help with the problem. OldVersion.com, for instance, offers more than 600 versions of about 65 different programs. The site's 16-year-old administrator says, 'Companies make a lot of new versions. They're not always better for the consumer.'"

Case in point:

[a_nonamiss]

Perfect case in point: I have a 4 year old laptop that I keep in my kitchen. It's running Windows XP (barely) but it's really low on memory. (192MB minus video memory) I like to listen to music on it, since it's in my kitchen and readily accessible. I recently installed the only downloadable version of WinAMP on it, and it uses almost 80-100MB of RAM while it's running. Now, when I used to run WinAMP on my old 233MHz Pentium with 32MB of memory, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't using 80MB of RAM while running. I don't need visual effects. I don't need an integrated web browser. I don't need a catalog of my 200GB music collection. I just want to listen to music... And it's not like iTunes or Windows Media Player are any better. They're hogs, too. I tried Foobar2000, but it hates my sound card and uses a lot of CPU. So I'm stuck. Whenever I start WinAMP, it takes 5 minutes to load, and when I quit, it takes 5 minutes to unload from memory.

I can't wait to get home and install WinAMP 2.0!

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[RandoX]

According to the site, they only have Freeware and Shareware. Unless the software companies are using some weird definition of the two, he SHOULD be able to legally distribute. Can you retract a shareware license?

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[IEBEYEBALL]

Yep. oldversion.com rocks. I recently got Sygate Personal Firewall onto that website by working with the site owner. Sygate Personal Firewall is a really nice free personal firewall for Windows that Symantec pulled from the market when they scarfed up Sygate.

Anyone who has ever used Quickbooks Enterprise ...

[SyncNine]

Will agree with you wholeheartedly.

The company I work for uses QuickBooks Enterprise. We started on Version 5 (Quickbooks 2005). It worked pretty well. There were a few very small hiccups, but mostly it did what we needed it to do. We had purchased upgrade protection because we knew a new version would be coming out shortly. About the 5th of December or so we received the 2006 Update.

Now, being skeptical to begin with, I was NOT going to install this right out of the box. It's one thing to upgrade WinZip or WinAmp to the next version, another thing entirely to take the company's accounting server down for an upgrade that hasn't been proven in the wild for more than 5 days.

Skip forward to the beginning of February. Two months have passed and the support forums on the QB2006 site are relatively quiet. There is no patch released yet, and no notification that they are working on a patch.

We decide to do the install.

WORST DECISION EVER

The system is completely unstable. It crashes repeatedly. We lose transaction data. It's not possible to 'downgrade' without completely knocking the server offline for baseline rebuild from ghost. The amount of data on the server would take about 8 hours to rebuild, and the server is being accessed about 18-20 hours a day by different shifts. We finally orchestrate a weekend rebuild about 7 days later, and then spend about 30 hours taking the data out of the new version and putting it into the old version.

I might add, when we called Intuit to tell them about our issues, here was their response: "Well, there's nothing we can tell you. It's a known issue. You'll have to downgrade to v5. We know the uninstall funcationality is broken, you'll need to restore from a previous backup. No, there's no ETA for when the patch is coming out."

To make matters worse, the version 6 update was a crock anyways. We've since installed it with the latest patch and it 'works', but it's slow as molasses, buggy as hell, and still notoriously unstable. If the Accounting department didn't habitually use two of its new features, I'd push us back to QB2005 just to stop having the issues.

Sure they do...

[Anubis350]

Ask and ye shall recieve, go here [apple.com]. Cheers!

Re:Upgrade != Better

[ArcherB]

30 or 40 builds, eh? What software company do you work for again? ;)

Yeah, I'm gonna tell you that!
When I say builds, I don't necessarily mean releases. Our official 4.0 release was actually 4.0.1.10. We are currenlty on 4.0.3.45 and things are finally more or less stable. There are just some things that can not be tested in house and don't show up until they get beat on by a customer. As soon as we find what these bugs are, we fix them, but the same customer may find 3 or 4 different bugs over the course of a couple of months. Upgrading all their systems can be a pain for both them and us.

We'll release a build between every 1-4 days, so it's not a major thing. Every major bug fix warrants a different build (because someone needs it todayto fix their bug).

Re:Case in point:

[Qapf]

Winamp 5 includes 2 modes, one for old computers with low ammounts of memory, and the other for people who want the nice stuff. During install choose the classic gui and it should be alot faster for you.

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[od05]

iTunes is now "unavailable" but the old versions are still on archive.org http://web.archive.org/web/20041012014729/http://w ww.oldversion.com/program.php?n=itunes [archive.org]

Re:That site won't last long now

[rehtonAesoohC]

I'm sure most companies don't care that he's providing old versions on his website. After all, those versions (in the mind of the companies) are all outdated and obfuscated, and if a user really wants to subject themselves to using such a "crappy" version, then they should feel free. Besides, TFA even says that he's only been asked to remove 2 programs from the site, and he complied both times.

Re:Anyone who has ever used Quickbooks Enterprise

[lilrowdy18]

We are having the same issues here with Quickbooks 2006 Standard and Accountants Edition. THis past weekend Intuit released a patch for the "File must be opened on the server feature" and other "features" which have given us a headache. We just updated our test "Quickbooks server" this morning and are working on getting the testing done. For those of you unaware, any flavor of Quickbooks 2006 is ectremely problamitic becuase they have made major changes to the database. One of them being (I beleive) is that they use Sybase now instead of a proprietary database. Anyways we are urging our clients to hold off on upgrading to Quickbooks 2006 until Intuit cleans up 2006.

Re:Case in point:

[Wolvie MkM]

Using WinAmp Lite v5.11 w/Classic Skin. 25G music collection with a little over 4 200 songs. It took up 24 megs on my WinXP Pro box a few minutes ago, I minimized it to the taskbar and voi-la! 1.5 megs of ram. BUT the only catch is that when it swaps songs it jumps back up to 18 megs... Might be lazy coding, might just be by design (ie. Lazy Coding).

Try that, you'll find if you minimize a lot of your programs you'll save the GUI from wasting memory keeping it refreshed on your screen.

Cheers,

Re:Case in point:

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had good luck with musikCube on my older machines light on RAM. Its small and nice. http://www.musikcube.com/ [musikcube.com]

Donkey rollback

[spyrochaete]

Edonkey has actually saved my butt a few times when new software versions fuddled or broke a service. There's a great catalogue of retired legacy versions of popular (and unpopular) apps on the ED2k networks. It ain't stealing if you bought it, right?

CoolPlayer - GPL and Lightweight

[Anonymous Coward]

http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[morcheeba]

Not exactly. Archive.org doesn't store large binary files. I found this out when downloading tools for an obscure processor [maushammer.com] - they had the smaller tools, but not the larger ones.

Try to download it from archive.org -- http://www.oldversion.com/downloadx/itunes41.exe [archive.org]"> http://web.archive.org/web/20060307125009/http://w ww.oldversion.com/downloadx/itunes41.exe [oldversion.com] -- it won't work. But, if you strip off the beginning of the URL, you can find out where oldversion.com used to store it -- in /dowloadx/itunes41.exe. It turns out oldversion.com still has it at this location and you can still download it from them.