My Weekend with Bernie the Computer

I was recently inspired by some work done by somebody else on the finances of a club I belong to, and decided to give Microsoft Home & Student Office Excel another go with my personal finances... I have been usually fearful of doing anything much more than web-surfing and reading email on my PC after the round of problems I had with my Vista notebook.

But first, detour #1 ... My Palm TX had not been sync'ing with my PC for over a month, and after trying both usb cable and wifi network connections, I decided that I had better look into the error message that I had been getting on the Palm lately. "Sys 0505" or something.

I quickly found via Google that this might be related to "MyPalm" and "MyTreo" software, and, after I deleted these, that did fix the sync'ing problem and the error message went away after soft-reset.

Onward... detour #2 ... dual-booted into Linux to see if I might sync my Palm under Linux... I started to use Open Office, but was having a printer driver installation issue under this installation of Fedora 9, and got sidetracked. I was able to fix the printer driver problem pretty quickly though, but then returned to Windows XP Pro to do battle with...

Detour #3 ... Windows OneCare Backups. My external hard drives are littered with Windows OneCare Backup folders. 3 or 4 at least with redundant backup information. Now Microsoft is announcing that they are going to convert OneCare into a free anti-malware package, but no word on how they will handle the backup functionality with OneCare. I don't think it is compatible with the standard backup built-in to Windows.
I would like to just delete some of these backup folders, because the external hard drives are running out of space, but Windows doesn't make that easy. It takes more than just removing the "read-only" bit in the properties box. Sigh. The lesson again is: don't rely on Microsoft for mission critical issues. In this case, backing up my important files, documents, and pictures so that they are secure and retrievable.

Finally, I did get around to downloading the bank account information, and all of the troublesome hand-holding that Office Excel did was actually helpful in sorting through the information... except for the 3 detours above.