Things Cascade

About two months ago, my daughter's Dell laptop died. Something happened to the hard drive, and she could not recover. The 'recovery partition', which had saved her on other occasions, was dead in the water. We were very reluctant to get her another one, as there is an aging desktop in the home office that works well enough for her to do her stuff, and, of course, get on Facebook. That we are frequently in and out of there is something she isn't thrilled about, but she survives.

In December, my wife's company had a sale on laptops. We bought one, with the intention of giving it to her when her birthday came around in a couple of months. I'm not exactly sure what moved us to do this. A little bit of it was that our own laptop was starting to be a tad unreliable. Like the desktop, it was good enough, but every so often,it would be really slow, or do something helpful -- as when the cat would brush against it, and the screen part would fall backwards (the famous poor Dell hinge). I understand that now they actually sell laptops where the hinge can be repaired without having to disassemble the laptop, but as we swore a mighty oath to never get a Dell again, I'll likely not know.

This month, we started thinking about replacing our cell phones. The model that my wife and I use is bare bones basic -- a candy-bar style that makes calls, and thats it. No web, no apps. I understand there are a couple of games on it -- my daughter's found them when she's borrowed one of our phones -- but I've never tried to play one. But over time I've noticed that it sure would be nice if the phone had a scheduling application. I remembered fondly when I had a Casio PDA where I could carry my schedule around, make notes, all that sort of thing. I really, really liked that PDA. And I was getting a little tired, whenever around kids of my daughter's age, of noticing that their phones were way better than mine. I have no use for mobile web or email access, but the things that their's could do amazed me.

So we started to think about replacing our phones. Verizon, which does our home phone (yes, we still have a landline - two, in fact) and our TV service, seems to have some decent ones. Of course, it would mean going from a pay-as-you-go, with ATT, to a contract plan with Verizon. (I understand that Verizon does have a PAYG, too.) But the prices aren't terrible -- though the net effect would still be a little more than twice what we pay now. We also thought that it might be good if any phone we got was GSM capable, so that we could use it in France. (Are we likely to call anyone while in France? Probably not.) So getting a phone that could do that would be fairly nice.

Of course, this would mean a new phone for my daughter, too. Fairs fair, after all. We thought she'd like that -- she's mentioned how she thinks her phone is awkward. I think she's noticed the nifty other ones, too. Whenever we see her cousin, she notices -- as I do -- that the cousin is totally wired, with a Kindle, a laptop, and a nifty little phone. The cousin's family has more money than us, and they are willing to Buy Her Things. We introduced the idea to the daughter, and at first she was cool to the idea -- the kid who said she could use a new phone now said Well, would I have to get a new phone? My wife thinks this is because we stress to her that she has to make choices, which she interprets as If I get a new phone, what don't I get that I would rather have? We don't know that this is her logic, but if it is, we like it.

Which leads us back to the laptop. Should she get a new phone and a new laptop at the same time? There's no inherent reason not to, but still.... so now we think Okay, we'll give her our old laptop and the new phone, and we'll take the new laptop. Which means leaving the comfortable environs of Windows XP for the slightly scary neighborhood of Windows 7, where you can't change the way things are presented in menus, no matter how much you hate it. But still: okay. Secretly, I start copying applications over to the new laptop. It's going well. And then my wife points out that I should try the absolute oldest application we have. Quicken. Its about, oh, fifteen years old.

It doesn't work. Apparently, some applications that old can be made to work under W7 via Compatibility Mode This and Administrator Rights That, but Q is not apparently one of them. We're going to have to upgrade it.

Rats. We tried an upgrade of Quicken about four years ago, and I absolutely hated it. Freaking pop-up ads everywhere. I didn't just throw it out, I destroyed the CDs on which it arrived. And looking at the promo for it on the Quicken site didn't delight me -- much, much bright lights and snappy colors, not much clear and sober detail. But I didn't like the idea of Mint (my data? in the cloud? Where anyone can get to it because, ooops, we forgot to secure it adequately? Not to mention, since Mint is owned by the same people that sell Quicken, perhaps mined for marketing opportunities? No thanks), and the other money-managers didn't seem all that great. Microsoft Money doesn't even exist any more. Others assume you have a Mac, or Linux. There is one other for Windows, but I couldn't remember its name.

So, because my daughter's laptop hard drive died, we're upgrading Quicken. I can hardly wait. But I'm buying it through Amazon. I don't like it, its going back immediately. Keep the box!