argh
September 12, 2008
Sometime yesterday afternoon, something went wrong with the video driver or monitor on my PC laptop. It just beeps at me when I turn it on. Beeeeeep Beep Beep -> black screen.
Now, I have been itching to get a MacBook now that my main machine is a Mac, but I don’t want to right this second. Rumor has it that the line is due for an update before the holidays, so it just doesn’t seem wise to buy one right now.
The two main uses of the PC laptop were Microsoft Money, where we keep all our accounting data, and the boys use it to look up walk-throughs for the console games they play while sitting in front of the tv. Only the first one is PC-centric. I do have back-up copies of the Money data files off-site, and I think that with an external monitor, I can probably get at them on the laptop.
And I do have a laptop I can use in the meantime, thanks to the good graces of the Toziers, who have lent me an old MacBook of theirs.
So. What to do, what to do. I’d like to move our accounting software to the Mac at some point, but QuickBooks seems like total overkill and Quicken for Leopard doesn’t exist right now. Having a PC around is useful for dev sometimes, but there are browser emulators online.
Argh. I’m so frustrated, I can’t even make a list of options. None are good. I just need a PC for this one stupid thing – we’ve got five years of financial data in there – otherwise, I’d just ditch the damn the thing.
Have you tried installing Fusion or Parallels on your desktop? (BTW I use Quickbooks PC version in Fusion, and it works fine.)
I’ve got Fusion and I’ve got a copy of Vista Ultimate, but I can’t use it because it keeps telling me I can’t validate it. I had a couple false starts with Fusion and reinstalled Vista a couple times – it’s not happy with me now. I suppose I should call Microsoft. Oh. Joy.
Yeah. I had to do that a couple of times. Not pain free, but I didn’t have to actually talk to anybody, either.
Well whaddaya know. I fired up Fusion and Vista and I had to do a bunch of activation rigamarole, and the silly ‘genuine’ thing – but this time it worked – it accepted the activation. Don’t know what changed, but it runs now. Yay – that makes the decision on what to do much more delayable.
This may seem insane to you, but I have been using http://www.gnucash.org/ successfully on my mac and pc for about 2 1/2 years now. It can import qif files, and works great for accounting.