How to upgrade from Streets & Trips 2006 to 2009?

Marvin, Purchased S&T 2009 for Christmas. I have 2006 installed with alot of my camping spots, truck stops, and various points of intrest downloaded in the program. I want to install 2009. Will I lose all my points? Will 09 pick up my downloads? Am I supposed to delete 2006 or will 09 copy over it and save my downloads? I,m not very computer literate so I need some help. Thanks GREG

You can keep your 2006 if you want. It will not over write it. The new 2009 will find and open the 2006 files.

I'll wait until a regular S&T user answers the question about the best way to install 2009 for sure. I just want to pop in a word of caution.

I think you can install it and leave your 2006 installation in place. From what I've seen in this forum about the incompatibilities in 2009 versus older versions of the files, I would certainly encourage you to make a couple of backup copies of your 2006 files and only experiment with a copy when you go to load them into 2009. I think the biggest problem with loading older versions of the data into 2009 is that the pushpin symbols get all screwed up because 2009 left out a bunch of them. I can't recall if there are other issues, but there has been much hair-pulling about the lack of backwards compatibility in the latest version.

...ken...

Greg, I'd go with both of the above suggestions.

Big Dave's suggestion to keep version 2006 is an excellent one. I have always kept old Streets & Trips while installing a new version. If there is any problem with the new version, I still have my old version available. At a later time, when I'm confident the new one works fine, I can uninstall the old.

Ken in Regine suggests to back up your files saved in the older version. That is indeed a must. Just copy them all to a different folder, before you attempt to open any of your precious old files in the new Streets and Trips version. When you open a file saved in an older S&T, the new S&T will prompt you to convert the older file into a new file format. If something goes wrong with the conversion, you will still have your back up copies that will still be openable at least in the old S&T.

The above shouldn't really scare you, as in the vast majority of cases installation of Streets & Trips 2009 goes just fine, and opening old S&T files in new S&T version goes just fine, too. But it is always prudent to take the proper precautions.

You might also want to read thru this topic so as to see what has occurred when others have tried to install MS S&T 2009. Save you a few headache's to know beforehand.

Streets and Trips 2009 licensing initialization error

The fix is simple, just takes time.