[Guide] Upgrade your Feathercoin wallet to 0.8.5.0 Windows
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There seam to be a lot of questions about how to do the upgrade of the Windows wallet so here’s a little guide for you ladies and gents.
You use this information at your own risk! I will not be held responsible if anything goes wrong, or you lose any information, data, or coins!
For reference I’m upgrading from v0.6.4.4 you can find out what version you have by selecting ‘Help’ from the menu bar at the top of the screen, and then selecting “About Feathercoin” from the drop down menu.
I’d make sure your not going to get any transaction through whilst your doing your upgrade, so do it just after you have had a pool payout, or any exchange transactions have taken place. Its safe to do so, but it does leave you wondering when you can’t see you new balance instantly during the initial reindexing phase of the upgrade.
** Making sure your wallet is up to date**
When you first launch your wallet it is likely to be out of date, this is reported by the red (out of sync) messages seen on the “Overview” page of your wallet
There are a couple of ways of telling if your wallet is syncing up, the first being the green status bar at the bottom of the window
and the second being on the information tab of the “Debug” window, which can be found from the “Help” menu
One thing I have noticed on the Windows client is the green status bar takes a few moments longer to update than the information in the “Debug” window, so if your impatient like me that’s the first place to look :)
Backing up your wallet
Once you have let your wallet sync it’s time to back it up.
So from the menu bar at the top of the screen click on the ‘File’ menu and select ‘Backup Wallet’’
And then on the ‘Backup Wallet’ window browse to the location you wish to store your wallet, give it a meaningful name and then click ‘Save’
Now would be a good time to take a couple of copies of your wallet, I recommend that you make sure one of these copies is on to a USB key or similar device in case you have a disk failure in your machine.
Upgrading
Get yourself along to [url=http://forum.feathercoin.com/index.php/topic,6167.0.html]here[/url] and download the latest version of the client
Close your wallet before you carry out the next steps…
Find the downloaded file and double click on it to launch it, you may receive a message about the program being from an unknown publisher, this is fine and expected so just click ‘Yes’ to let it carry on.
Your going to get a message about the client being installed and an uninstall needs to take place first, simply click ‘Yes’ to allow this to happen
and then click ‘Yes’ to confirm that Feathercoin is not running and you want to continue
a nice little message to keep you informed of what is going on needs a simple ‘OK’ to carry on the process
and then the installer will start, select your language and from the drop down menu and then click ‘Next>’
As with all installers it’s recommended that all other applications are closed before proceeding, click ‘Next>’ to carry on
Entirely up to you, but I’m going to go with the default install directory, and click ‘Next>’ to move on
A few more customisation options to chose from, again I went with the defaults for simplicity , and again ‘Next>’ to carry on
A screen to confirm your choices, click ‘Install’ to get it started
I’ve lost the screen grab at this point, so as long as you get the option to Install everything is going well at this point!
And when it’s complete a message to tell you so, click ‘Finish’ and the new client will load
When loaded you will notice that your client is again out of sync, and a number of weeks behind…
A quick hover over the status bar will show you what is going on
More detailed information of what is going on can be found on the “Information” tab of the “Debug” window, which can be found from the “Help” menu
This process takes time! you can see how things are going by moving the mouse away from the status bar and then back again, the number of processed blocks will increase and the last received block generation time will decrease. Mine took about 25 mins to complete this process but it all depends on the number of blocks needed to sync your wallet.
Check your version number by selecting ‘Help’ from the menu bar at the top of the screen, and then selecting “About Feathercoin” from the drop down menu.
If your stuck give me a shout and I’ll see if I can help you out, enjoy and keep the coin
UM