So what you have to ask yourself is, do you feel lucky, punk?

[unixronin]

That may be the question if you're considering "upgrading" to Windows Vista.  There's apparently enough doubt in the success of a Vista upgrade that many retailers are allowing Vista upgrades to be returned if your upgrade failed ... but now electronista reports that it appears a Vista upgrade permanently invalidates your XP license keys.  So you may not be able to go back.

What's more, you cannot do a clean install using a Vista upgrade by showing it your XP install media — a Vista upgrade will install only on top of an existing installation.  So if your Vista system craps itself badly enough that you have to reinstall, you have to reinstall XP first, only your XP license keys may by now be invalid ....

Sucks to be you, don't it?

Comments

Lesson

[adriang.livejournal.com]

The lesson: Never trust Microsoft for anything that's important to you.

Adrian

Re: Lesson

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I'll go along with that. In this house, Windows is GameOS ... period.

(OK, technically I still run Quicken on my gamebox, because I've not yet found an open-source alternative that I like. But the data's not stored there -- my Quicken data is on this machine, and network-mounted via Samba.)

Re: Lesson

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

What's the state of GNUCash these days?

Re: Lesson

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Gnucash might be an option after I finally get babylon5 reinstalled with Gentoo, but I understand it's double-entry based and rather more business than home oriented.

Still, it's an option. i just haven't been able to try it out yet because the dependency tree for the Gnome requirements is so frelling hideous.

Re: Lesson

[tabbifli.livejournal.com]

Alex uses GnuCash, and while it's double-entry based, it's all very automatic. You set up categories that make sense to you based on your spending and income, and it automatically handles the double-entry - you don't have to do any of it. It's just like entering into quicken, it just looks different. You can actually import your quicken files in and it'll create everything for you, too (with very little neatening required after, but isn't there always?)

I'm going to have to get used to GnuCash once we've moved, after some dozen years of using Quicken, but having poked at it a little bit, it isn't bothering me, it's looking relatively comfortable. It's also looking very stable, after about 5 or 6 years of Alex using it.

GnuCash doesn't seem to have some of the same report types and nifty automated budgeting tools that Quicken has, but since I've never particularly found Q's budgeting tools all that accurate, I don't mind the latter, and the reports that GnuCash seem to be missing are some of the ones that a reasonably competant person with an emacs (or VI) installation and a text file could probably put together relatively easily.

Re: Lesson

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

The last four words of that sentence were extraneous.

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

I'm quietly waiting for Microsoft to implode in a giant black hole of suckage. They appear to be getting closer!

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I am still waiting for someone I trust to say something good about Vista, anything.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

And the curent estimates are that only 15-25% of the "90% of computers in homes today can upgrade to vista" can upgrade to more than vista basic features- no matter WHICH version you actually buy.

Due to consulting/contractng, I have to deal with windows sometimes. I've already told everyone I work through that I am NOT touching vista outside of a corporate (and I don't mean small business, I mean like dell support gold brown-nose contract corporate) for at least 12 months. Maybe longer. I make more money in construction anyway.

[laurarey.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my very smart, very frustrated 74 year old mother discovered as much this past week. She called and asked, "Laura, why exactly would someone make a product that once you install it, you can't go back to what you had before? That's just wrong....and isn't a good consumer experience."

I thought for a moment and said, "Because they can."

My next response would have been, "Mom, have you thought of switching to Linux?"

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I thought for a moment and said, "Because they can."

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up ... Microsoft knows it's the 800lb gorilla. It's like the days of Ma Bell and the SNL Switchboard Lady: "We're the phone company. We don't HAVE to care."