Knight Keystor

A record of my journey of chess improvement.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Retaining PCT 2.0 Training History

Pale Morning Dun brought up a good point that I neglected to mention in the Personal Chess Trainer 2007 review. The issue is whether the training history and progress is carried over from PCT 2.0 to PCT 3.0 when you upgrade. The short answer is no, but there is an easy solution. First though, let me give a quick explanation of the situation...

When you install the new version of PCT, it is a fresh install into C:\Program Files\Personal Chess Trainer 2007...it doesn't overwrite or upgrade the install of PCT 2.0 which is located (at least by default) in C:\Program Files\Personal Chess Trainer. On the one hand, this means that you can still access version 2.0 and everything still works as normal, but on the other it means that none of the user data, history, or progress is carried over to the new version. With that explained, on to the solution...

If you want to keep your existing history and current progress from PCT 2.0 intact when you move to PCT 2007, it is relatively easy to do. Once you have downloaded, installed, registered, and activated PCT 2007, create a user account and then close the program. Open either My Computer or Windows Explorer (whichever method you prefer) and navigate to C:\Program Files\Personal Chess Trainer\Users\username, where username is the name of the user account you created in PCT 2.0. Select all the .dat files (and ONLY the .dat files...you don't want to copy the .ini or .pc* files) and then click the "Edit" menu and "Copy." Now navigate to C:\Program Files\Personal Chess Trainer 2007\Users\username and then click the "Edit" menu and "Paste."

Once this is done, you can close the window and start PCT 2007 back up. If it was done correctly, all of your history should be intact and if you were in the middle of a unit in PCT 2.0, you should be able to pick up right where you left off.

I hope that helps...feel free to let me know if you run into any problems.

7 Comments:

Blogger Abend said...

Wow, nice find!

When I ran into problems restoring the entire set of user files, I didn't look any further. Oh well, I probably needed to go over the early problems again, anyway...

4/12/2007 11:33 AM  
Blogger Ron said...

abend,

Thanks! Yeah, you don't want to copy all the files as some of the other files have settings and what not that seem to be version specific. The .dat files however are basically just plain text that the history and progress portions pull from.

As an aside, you can even open the .dat files in notepad and edit them...not sure why you'd want to, but you can.

Thanks,
Ron

4/12/2007 11:43 AM  
Blogger Pale Morning Dun - Errant Knight de la Maza said...

Ron,
Many thanks. Now I can feel more comfortable with getting the 2007 version.

4/12/2007 9:23 PM  
Blogger Ron said...

Pale Morning Dun,

Glad I could help :)

Ron

4/13/2007 7:46 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Does PCT 2007 work on Windows Vista?? On mine it doesn't work!

5/13/2007 9:32 AM  
Blogger Ron said...

Hi anonymous,

Yes, I've been running PCT 2007 under Vista. The trick is to set it up to run as administrator. If you right click on the shortcut and go to properties, there should be a box on the compatibilities tab that can be checked for "always run this program as an administrator" or something similiar.

Hope that helps,
Ron

5/14/2007 7:53 AM  
Anonymous Erin Fields said...

Thanks for thiss blog post

5/11/2022 1:07 AM  

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