We recently purchased two new Compaq PC's loaded with the new, improved Windows 7. We thought, great! Newer is better! And to be fair W7 does have some cute features. But we had forgotten the lessons we failed to learn when we upgraded to the newer versions of Internet Explorer.
We had moved from IE 6 to 7 without too much trauma, just a hiccup here and there and this I think was the planting of the evil seed of confidence. Then came IE 8. Some gurgling now, indigestion even, because some of the programs we use had not been tested on IE 7 and they suffered something like organ rejection.
Bruised and a little worse for the (enormous) time spent / wasted, we still managed to get through it and return to an acceptable level of functionality.
IE 8 should have been the Grim Teacher. But when our 10 year old PC's began squeaking and groaning we thought well, new towers, new operating system, new Microsoft Office 2007, new email system (Outlook instead of Express). . . we need to get some speed and efficiency implants.
We even realized some savings when the tech who spent the day transferring our files and configuring the new devices, suggested a service pack that would allow us to scan pages directly into pdf, thus avoiding the need to buy Adobe Acrobat ($299).
So far so good.
Leaving the warm, comfy XP operating system did not seem hard to us at this juncture. How much different could Windows 7 be anyway? And as I said, it isn't that different. Better in many ways in fact than XP.
But the other programs we depend on did not concur. Quicken for one. We had the 2008 version which immediately locked up the report printing function when it saw W7. It's a little beyond impossible to do real estate, property management, and manage your own personal finances without printing. Intuit charges $24.99 for support calls so we chose the free online chat solution. I use "free" and "solution" advisedly though because the experience took over four hours and somewhere in the process we completely misplaced our entire property management account.
This happened I think because when you do live chat you must be exceedingly clear with questions and the answers must be carefully constructed to insure that you do not skip any steps in the solution. However this chat worker was not the sharpest knife in the kitchen in terms of his command of English and making the situation worse he was working perhaps a dozen other callers along with me. Can you imagine jumping back and forth between 12 different technical conversations all day long? No wonder his answers were brief and short on detail.
He said he would give us a free 2009 version of Quicken which would work fine with Windows 7 but when I followed his directions and downloaded the file it said it had to uninstall the earlier version in order to install itself. That's where that business acount went sideways I think. We back up Quicken online plus we have an external hard drive which backs up both our PC's so it's really not "lost". It's just that we have to hire a tech to come out here and find it.
So I'm not whining. Not really. We have faster PC's and we can do pdf. files now after all and we hope to find that Quicken account sometime before the end of the month.
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