Wide World of Women

I've had Yahoo messenger (version 8.1.0.239) for years and its always worked fine. All of a sudden I am unable to connect. My OS is Vista. My Yahoo IM connection settings have always been set to "No Proxies" by default. When I change settings to "Firewall with No Proxies" I am able to connect but it keeps saying to upgrade to the 9.0 version. So...the next thought was to back up my archive messages before upgrading. I located my message archive on my hard drive, copied and pasted the folder to my desktop. When I went to open the messages all I got was a bunch of jibberish. They are .dat files and I tried to open them with notepad, wordpad, MS office and nothing worked! My question is if I upgrade to the 9.0 will I lose all my archived chats? I've read conflicting reports about that online and really don't wanna take the chance of losing them. How do I open .dat files??

I was wondering about this as well (9.0 has an update available... but I am afraid to do so in fear of losing my archived messages).

My thought was to do what you did... copy the archive folder but I have not yet searched for its location.

One things is that... in order to open them... and have them readable (assuming once you upgrade, your archived messages are indeed gone), you would have to place them in the new Messenger archive folder (in your Program Files). This way, they would be able to be read in Messenger.

But only do so if your archive is no longer there after the upgrade.

And I have not attempted the above... it is simply what I believe would work in logic so please be forewarned.

Another thing... Version 9 is so much better than 8. I manually upgraded back in November as for some reason, Yahoo’s upgrade checker never notifies you of upgrades or updates (or perhaps it is just me).

I had no idea that Version 9 existed until a friend wished to chat by IM and downloaded it. There were all of these new features available (I was trying to walk her through how to change her preferences and things were different on her end) and that was the giveaway that there was a new upgrade.

So manually check every once in awhile as well!

Hope someone else can chime in and be more specific.

P.S.

I believe Yahoo may be experiencing some issues with Messenger as I too have been having a lot of trouble connecting as of recent. Either that or ZoneAlarm (or AVG) is at fault.

I wonder if you have either of those programs installed as well.

Hey righter I gambled this morning and upgraded to 9.0. Before doing so I copied and saved my archives to my desktop in hope of putting them back if indeed I did lose them after the upgrade. Well good news...I upgraded and did not lose a thing! Every single one of my archives were still there. I also have no problem at all connecting now. I am loving the new 9.0 messenger and it's design alot. BTW I have Windows Live One Care for my virus protector and have no clue if that had anything to do with me having problems connecting with the old 8.1 version of YIM. Anyways I'd say the safe thing to do would be to save your archives just in case like I did before you upgrade. But you should have no problem or lose a thing. Here is where you can locate the archives.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 539AArPUIe