Is there any way that I can have both my previous Doll Shop Deluxe and the new version running on my computer at the same time? Can they coexist if one is installed in another directory, rather than the default Living Soft directory?

Although there are some nice improvements in the new version, there are things that just aren't working right for me. If I could use the older version for things that I can't seem to figure out in the new version, it would be a big help. I tried reinstalling the old version, and found that the new version was gone after the install, so I don't want to try again until I can get instructions on how to do it so that both will run on the same computer.

Thanks.
Karen in Maine

quote:

Is there any way that I can have both my previous Doll Shop Deluxe and the new version running on my computer at the same time? Can they coexist if one is installed in another directory, rather than the default Living Soft directory?

Although there are some nice improvements in the new version, there are things that just aren't working right for me. If I could use the older version for things that I can't seem to figure out in the new version, it would be a big help. I tried reinstalling the old version, and found that the new version was gone after the install, so I don't want to try again until I can get instructions on how to do it so that both will run on the same computer.

It might be possible to run both if they are in separate folders, but I'm not sure. Frankly, I suspect that Windows registry issues would make it not work properly. I do run both on my system, but they are debug versions, running within a development tool that does not use the Windows registry and what I see is not quite what Windows would allow you to see.

A lot of the reason that you are having difficulties that others do not is that you own an uncommon collection of products. Most of our customers own some version of Dress Shop. Your mix of Doll Deluxe, Essential Patterns for Girls, plus various addon pattern collections is less common. There are many, many features in Dress Shop that are activated based on what products are owned and the combinations of activation possibilities is astronomical.

Dress Shop 4, for instance, included 3 versions - Lite, Standard, and Pro. Later Dress Shop versions included Basic, Deluxe and Advanced. There have been 14 versions of core Dress Shop 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 as well as several different versions of Doll Shop and Doll Shop Deluxe. Every single one of those products included its own list of features, patterns, and options. There were also other settings and options that were activated by owning Illusions, Fashion Designer 1, Fashion Designer 2, Princess Designer, or The Fit Tool. All of these are quite independent of the hundreds of Dress Shop pattern collections that have been released over the last decade.

With Dress Shop 8, we have tried to consolidate and simplify all this into 2 simple versions: Standard and Pro, so that future buyers will not have a bewildering array of choices to get lost in. For new buyers, what you get should be simpler to understand. For upgraders, there is just one price, not an array of variations based on what you owned before. All of these changes were done to make things simpler and to reduce the questions and confusion about the Dress Shop / Doll Deluxe products.

While simplifying it all, we have also tried to maintain everything that everyone had before and that has been much more challenging. There are over 130 Livingsoft products and any single customer might own any combination of those. There are trillions of possible combinations and we certainly are not able to check each of them individually. Insuring that every one of those customers still has exactly the same patterns, options, features, and tools as they did prior to upgrading is challenging, particularly when there are some features and tools that are being discontinued or replaced along the way. We have tried hard to keep everything the same, but we also have thrown in a variety of new features and patterns to compensate for any that were dropped.

In the end, there are still a handful of changes that were not intended, mostly cases that only one or two customers might ever see and may or may not care about. When we hear that something that was included in prior versions is not included in the latest and that it is needed and wanted, we try to restore it. Having the yoke edit settings available for Doll Shop Deluxe owners, for instance, is something we can do.

Insuring that current versions of Dress Shop can run simultaneously with obsoleted versions is far less likely and certainly not anything we intend to work on.

So, would I be better off deleting the patterns I had in my previous version? How do I do that now that they've been integrated into it? I know that when I've uninstalled and reinstalled, the program knows the pattern sets I have. I could probably manipulate the program to reconstruct the patterns that I bought as add-ons.... at least the ones that I found useful for the dolls.

If you can tell me how to deactivate the program sets that I have in the program, I'll do that and see if some of my problems disappear. At this point, I've spent $89 more and have a program that is frustrating me. I'll do anything to make it work more consistently for me.

Thanks.
Karen