Good practice for installing new memoQ versions

How to avoid grief when you are an unwitting beta tester....

In recent years, the memoQ desktop translation environment typically undergoes several version upgrades. For those who have a current service and maintenance agreement (SMA), these newer versions are available to download, install and use without charge. After purchasing a new memoQ desktop license, users have a free SMA year included, after which there is an annual fee of about 20% of the listed retail price to cover ongoing costs to the company for maintaining Help desk support and development operations. If one’s SMA lapses (due to non-payment), all versions of the software covered during the period in which the SMA was active remain available regardless of whether they were installed before the lapse. And all those versions will continue to work indefinitely (usually until Microsoft does something to its operating system that messes up compatibility, but that doesn’t happen very often). I still occasionally encounter people running memoQ versions as old as 4.x, which were current when I began using memoQ 15 years ago.

But technology marches inexorably onward, with new operating systems, new translatable file formats, and improvements to the features and compatibility of the tools we rely on for professional work, so usually a day will come when users with a lapsed SMA find it necessary or desirable to upgrade. The company’s current upgrade policy requires that the fees for the “gap years” be paid (up to the full amount of a new license if enough years have passed) when the SMA is renewed to get the latest version. There is sometimes a bit of grumbling about that by people who haven’t found the need to ask for help or to work with newer versions for a long time, but I think it’s a perfectly fair deal when you consider that the folks who will help you or build the new versions you may want someday need to eat in the meantime. If you’re a sociopath who disagrees, well that’s on you :-)

But this post is about best practices for installing new versions, right? Well, yeah. Let’s talk about that. Too often I hear from translation colleagues who install a new version on top of an old one (or otherwise delete the files for an older, functioning version), only to find that the latest, greatest version ain’t so great at something that the older version handled without trouble. So they go through a lot of trouble uninstalling the latest (buggy) version and re-installing something that works. Or they suddenly find that they are unable to work on jobs for a corporate client with a memoQ TMS server because the versions are a functional mismatch.

All of that trouble can be avoided easily. As a memoQ desktop edition user, you can install an unlimited number of versions in parallel on your computer. And you have the right to install a license for each version on two different computers, which is done simply by changing the last digit of the license number (usually from “1” to “2”). When installing a version of memoQ, take care to create a unique directory for the version to be installed. This is how you avoid overwriting another version. I made a YouTube video a few years ago which shows the whole process, as well as how to update your license from memoQ’s central activation server:

OK, but what if you really want to get rid of an older version that you no longer need or want? In that case, you can uninstall the older version(s) of memoQ the way you should uninstall any other Windows-based software: in the Windows Control Panel usually labeled Add or remove programs. Here’s a view of that on my Windows 11 system after I clicked the ellipsis button to uninstall my version 9 of memoQ:

But I won’t really be uninstalling my memoQ 9 version anytime soon. I have to perform administration and project management tasks on memoQ TMS servers of both major versions, and to do so from my computer desktop (as opposed to the web interface), that requires me to have each version available.

Often we don’t discover problems with a newly installed version right away. Typically, these discoveries are made just as a large, difficult project has been completed and should be delivered. To avoid shit hitting the fan and getting all over your face, ignore what other people say about how great and stable and bug-free the new version is and keep your old versions(s) around as cheap insurance. Then often all you need to do to generate that Trados return package or export the translated Excel file, or whatever critical task is called for, is to close the memoQ application and open your project in an older version in which the broken function still works.

To learn about what useful things you may be missing in the latest versions of memoQ, have a look at this old blog post.

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