This has been quite a week for me. About four days ago, on Saturday evening, my laptop gave me a memory failure warning when I shut it down. That's never a comforting sign.
On Sunday, I booted it backup again, but every operation I attempted was like wading through quick-set concrete. I'll spare you the details, but the end result was my decision to reinstall my operating system.
After 48 hours of tedious updates and installations, I love the “new-ness” of having a cleaned up machine. (Yes, I do realize that this is just a bandaid … the hardware is going to fail again.) However, with all of my backups, Roboform to remember all of my passwords (love that service), and Chrome acting like nothing happened, there was just one glitch. When I reinstalled Memory Manager and tried to activate it, I realized that I cannot activate it anymore.
Doh!
That's the one thing that I didn't think through before I took the leap. In retrospect, it wouldn't have mattered, because my computer was unusable before the reinstall anyway.
The good news is, Artisan and Historian aren't nearly the hit to the wallet that Storybook Creator and Memory Manager were. In fact, I got into both programs for just a little more than I would have spent initially purchasing just one of them before.
I started out downloading Historian because I had already restored my main memory vault from my File History (a great backup feature available in Windows 8). The installation went smoothly, it activated quickly, and I opened my memory vault with no problems. Other than the new logo/look, this is the same program and works just like Memory Manager.
Next, I downloaded and installed Artisan. Since I hadn't reinstalled Storybook Creator on my cleaned up machine, it didn't recognize that I was a Creative Memories user. That's ok, though. It's still the same program I had before, and it's capable of using all of the Creative Memories' digital content I had. It took me a little while to restore all of my packages, but they are now all happily recognized in the content manager and we're ready to get back to work.
The good news through all of this is that I hopefully learned something the hard way before you have to. If you're contemplating upgrading your computer, keep in mind that you won't be able to reactivate your Creative Memories software anymore. However, your projects and your memory vaults aren't affected by that. They will still remain usable or readable by Artisan and Historian. Keep them backed up and safe, and your work will survive the transition.
Until the next time, Enjoy!
~ Deb
Thank you for your clear, no nonsense views on SBC/Artisian etc. I am still using SBC4 & MM4 but feel much better about moving over to Panstoria if I have to in the future. Thanks again for the informative updates
You’re very welcome, Linda. I know there has been a lot of confusion, and I hope to help.
~ Deb
I have purchased a new computer, backed up my memory vault from CM memory manager 3.0 on my old computer on an external drive. I went to my new computer with Historian I also just purchased. Went to add a new vault, went to my external drive to get my vault, and it says it’s not compatible (or something to that effect). Am I missing something? You sounded like it transferred so easy so what am I doing wrong?? Help!
Brenda, you should be ok. What it is telling you is that because you are “upgrading” to version 4, you have to update your vault. If you had purchased Memory Manager 4, it would have asked you to do the same thing.
Let me make sure that I’m reading this right, though. Are you trying to open your old vault, or are you trying to open the shadow copy? If you are using the shadow copy, you’ll need to open Historian, click on the icon for Recover a Vault, and then browse to the shadow copy. That will prompt you to create your vault on your new computer in the new version.
If you’re just trying to open your original vault, it should be prompting you to update your vault to version 4. Once you do that, it will open just like it did before.
Please let me know if that doesn’t work or you have other problems. If we needed to, I could open a Google Hangout and we could take a look.
Deb