Posted on 04/06/2008 5:31:58 AM PDT by Notary Sojac
I think Dell wants to keep selling the system and I think Microsoft will go along with them. If you look on ebay you will find an xp system alway sells for more than vista!
> Can you import a Quickbooks file seamlessly to Gnucash?
Dunno.
It appears to handle Quicken, if exported to .QIF from
a 2006 version or earlier.
Try some web searching.
The GC site is: http://www.gnucash.org/
See also for links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnucash
Hey the application I work on has pulled that one. It’s pretty funny but apparently a fairly hard one to get, we managed to get it when trying to manipulate a registry entry before our install had put it there.
Yeah of course Vista is going to underperform against and older platform when it is purposely derailed with 1 gig of ram and a slow processor, yep thats a fair fight.
1 GB is twice what MS says it needs. Of course lets look at the problem of a non-server OS that the maker admits needs half a gig of RAM.
Exactly but the anti-MS bots who don’t know jack completely ignored the fact that the test used less ram and less cpu than what is normally bought in todays computers which Vista was designed for.
Being the minimum for what it takes to run and being what it takes to run good is two different things, if going by your premise then the XP box should have had 512mb of ram instead of the 1 gig, which would have been twice what XP’s minimum requirements were.
Part of the problem is that the industry as a whole, and this really is not just a MS crime, lie like rugs about system requirements. In an effort to get more people to buy their product they put forth numbers that are just a fiction, sure most apps/ OSes will start on a system they speced but that’s about it. XPs recommended is 128MB, which is laughable, anybody that tries to run XP with less than a gig is being silly. Vista’s recommendation is 512MB, again laughable, some folks say 2GB is fine for Vista, my usage says don’t even think about it until you hit 4. 4X to 8X seems to be MS’s fudge factor, take what they say multiply it by somewhere between 4 and 8 and you’ll actually find out what the product needs.
Again this isn’t just an MS thing, the recommendation on EA games is silly, their fudge is 2 to 4. Even the app I work on, what we say is about half the system I’d be willing to even try to work the app on. Somebody should start a website tracking the difference between their recommended and user recommendation, kind of like the sites that track MPG stats.
Of course to be fair we got that message on a 2K3 box, I think the error comes out of .Net or the C runtime, not the OS directly.
2 GB is more than enough for Vista and most apps on it, I play Oblivion with that amount of ram on my Vista box. But back to the point, if you want to have a fair comparison of the two you have to set up things respective to what ‘era’ of computing they were built on. Obviously XP is going to perform exceptionally well with 1 gig and a 1.8 Ghz dual core processor, but Vista being the newer and beefier OS needs more as it was designed for the future as was XP was when it came out so doggedly slow in 2001 and didnt hit it stride for a couple of years. So comparing the two is disingenious at best if they don’t have comparable parts in respective to their system requirements.
Hmm. Appears to handle QIF files, (quicken) but not QBW (quickbooks).
Looks like they’re gunning for Intuit though. Quickbooks compatibility is only a matter of time. Good.
I agree with this in the case of PC gaming. The game developers have apparently been getting kickbacks from the video card companies for a decade.
But an operating system has as its essential task a consistent interface for file access, keyboard, video, networking and printing. That's about it. There is no reason why an improved OS should not be able to run faster than its predecessors, and "Brand A" has shown that from time to time that can be done.
I would not even think of moving to Vista until the hardware that will "run Vista screamingly fast" drops down to that price range.
I've always installed MS operating systems about 2-3 years after they come on the market. But I will pass on Vista regardless because of (1) the DRM issue and (2) the lack of any compelling features in Vista.
Vista should run screamingly fast with your setup, well depending on the gpu. But installing a OS after a year or two of its first release is always a good idea, I however just love being an early adopter.
Oh, and I believe I read somewhere that DirectX 10 is quite the memory hog also. Your right though, it is mainly for gamers, but they LOVE it...
> Hmm. Appears to handle QIF files, (quicken) ...
Yes, but Intuit is apparently moving away from QIF to QFX,
and they charge for access to QFX.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QIF
> ... but not QBW (quickbooks).
Don’t count on that happening. Intuit is unlikely to
open the format, and GC is unlikely to reverse-engr
it. Look for some advice on how to generate QB reports
in comma-delimited formats, to .txt file, that could
then be batched into GC.
> Looks like they’re gunning for Intuit though.
Not really. The point of the GC effort, as with most
FOSS software, is to provide a useful tool in an
open way. Deliberate competition with commercial
products is rarely the goal. It’s just a side effect.
> Quickbooks compatibility is only a matter of time. Good.
Assume that this is not the case, and that others have
made the transition, and have write-ups on how.
In any event, all computer users need to focus on
getting their important data OUT of proprietary formats.
Increasingly, the app providers are moving to toward
charging you recurring fees to just read your own data.
QuickBooks has been time-bombed for years. No subscription
or upgrade, no new tax tables.
And then there are the apps that vanish altogether, fail
in the market or get bought and killed, and your
legacy copy is soon unrunnable on newer operating systems.
Where I work, we have key spreadsheets that are in a now
unreadable file format. Any I work on get converted to or
created in .ods.
Hmmm. Thanks for the perspective.
I hate it when that happens!
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