Just a few PC-related musings today....
MS Money to Quicken Converter: It's a Flop.
Microsoft Money is decidedly the single most important application I currently use on my home PC. Plainly put, it works great for my purposes. I launch the program, it scoops up data from my various financial institutions automatically and gives me a true dashboard view of my fiscal situation. It was my trusted co-conspirator during my transition away from paper statements and billing. ("Kids, you know the truck that drops off Netflix DVDs? It used to deliver envelopes containing messages from companies that wanted you to pay them something. We would write the amount we wanted to pay on slips of paper and send those back....")
Know that feeling when you've become totally hooked on a new television show, only to have the network cancel it prematurely? Well, that's what I'm dealing with as MS sends Money off to manage its own retirement. I've been pondering some alternatives as support will fall away over the next year, but I can already report that my number one option of switching to Quicken isn't looking smooth.
I bought and installed a copy of Quicken 2010 Deluxe and followed the prompt to import my existing Money file. The result was insane. The first thing I noticed was that the program downloaded statement updates from the bank that duplicated existing transaction entries and failed to notice the duplication. Not only that, but there is no facility to match the downloaded transactions. The "Downloaded Transactions" tab that is supposed to handle this . . . doesn't exist. Picking out and deleting nine months worth of duplicated transactions isn't exactly my idea of a good time.
It got even more entertaining when I started looking closely at my mangled transactions. All of my purchases from a frequently-visited store were tagged with the memo "car muffler," when that store doesn't even sell mufflers. And all of my PayPal purchases were categorized as gifts . . . for one very lucky individual.
I have a feeling that if I do choose to switch to Quicken, it will be less headache in the long run just to start a new file from scratch and populate it with only my current accounts.
I Wish The Upgrade Advisor Had Told Me My Media Player Setup Was "Obsolete"
For day-to-day CD ripping and music playing, I had gotten very comfortable with using Windows Media Player. My digital music collection is currently on a small NAS device. Under Windows XP, both my desktop and laptop machines had their WMP libraries pointed there. After last month's OS upgrade I was surprised to find out that Windows 7 Libraries simply will not include network drives such as the one being shared from my inexpensive NAS. Yes, WMP will play the individual files, but it's not nearly as nice as having them actually cataloged and indexed in the Library.
I could copy the files over to the local hard drive, but then I'm faced with the organization hassle that using a network server solved in the first place. I'm thinking of upgrading the slow and aging NAS to something like an HP Mediasmart. It would certainly be a spiffy addition to the home network, and it should solve that Windows 7 annoyance. I just wish buying Windows Home Server wouldn't make me feel as if I was rewarding Microsoft for disabling something that worked in an earlier version of Windows.
Or I could use iTunes full-time. On second thought, no I won't. Eek!
So That's Why I Kept That 25-Foot Patch Cable
Oh, there was resolution to my roadblock with wireless networking in Linux. Once I stretched a cable across the room to connect my router and my desktop PC, Ubuntu immediately updated itself by downloading and installing drivers for my wireless adapter. Put that one away in the "chicken-and-egg" file. It's too bad SUSE wouldn't respond the same way.
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