Computerised Money = traumatic

Over the last few weeks I've been having a little panic (oh obsessive stupid me) over my computer and the software on it.

I'm a bit of a software luddite. I only use what I need to and nothing more.
I need:
Word, Excel, Outlook Express for e-mail, IE for browsing, my Palmtop software, a photos program, i-tunes and a couple of utilities.
That's it.
& Microsoft Money. I've been using Microsoft Money since Dave at Nostalgia & Comics gave me a copy of Money 95 and told me how good it was. I've not looked back since then. Everything goes into money, all the house finances, all my finances, all the essential phone numbers, usernames - the lot.

In fact I have no idea how people without some form of financial software manage to do stuff like balancing a cheque book. Ni idea how to do it. For the last 12 years I've been doing all of that with Money.

So a few weeks ago when Louise's sister gave me a copy of Office 2003 I realised how old some of my software was. I was running Office 97, Publisher 98 & Money 99. Everything else on the system was as up to date as I could get it. Latest everything. Except the stuff I relied on most of all.
So I installed Office 2003 and it's fine. Nothing different to Office 97 really in terms of day to day use.
But then I started looking at Money and after doing a quick check as to what was available and what I could buy came to the horrifying conclusion that Money 2006 & Money 2007, the only readily available commercial versions, were completely incompatible with Money 99. Oh bugger. And Money 2007 was meant to be a bit crap and unstable as well. (Imagine that, a Microsoft program that is a bit unstable, well how unlikely).

So I hunted down a copy of Money 2004. It's amazing how you can get hold of these things when you put your mind to it. It was meant to be compatible, but there were a few horror stories about old Money files not being upgraded and information being lost.

So tonight, before upgrading, I opened up Money 99 for the last time and carefully wrote down every last bit of financial information on it for reference should I need to manually enter it.

Then I popped the cd in and crossed my fingers.
And guess what, after all that worry, all the obsessive transcribing, all the fretting, it did it perfectly with 6 mouse clicks.
Of course the whole interface has changed and it's going to take a lot of getting used to but all the information is there. No problem at all.
(Although, sadly, a little voice inside me is saying "yes, but if you hadn't have done all that needless prep it would have all fucked up on you". I'm just a hopeless case.)