Despite the switch from Windows to Mac, I am still haunted by Windows problems. I use Parallels to run XP, because there are Windows programs for which I have not found an acceptable Mac substitute. The Mac Quicken is a poor shadow of the Windows version, and is mostly an annoyance, not a real application. I use NeoOffice rather than Microsoft Office for my text and spreadsheet needs, but I really prefer Excel over the NeoOffice version because I have so many muscle memory ways of using it that work in entirely different ways in NeoOffice.
The Parallels application has been bugging me to update it for weeks now, and I finally did, which was a huge mistake. Windows disappeared entirely, and Parallels asked me for a reinstall of the OS. Which required a reinstall of all the programs I use under Windows. It meant figuring out, yet again, how to turn off that damned dancing paper clip in Office. And searching out where the Turn Off Sounds button is in Quicken.
I had to restore my 2008 file in Quicken, but when I tried, it crashed the program. I tried the same file on Robins XP machine, and it failed there too. My local backup was corrupt. So was my Excel spreadsheet of my financials for the year. Yikes!
It made me remember a computer freeze-up the week before, where I had to do a hard shutdown. My Macs are not problem free. Stuff still happens. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but I suspect that Parallels and Windows were running at the time, and the open files became corrupted in the shutdown.
What saved me was my daily backup disk, which I hadn't run in a while. I'd been a bad boy. In this case, it meant that my corrupted files, which had been sitting on the main hard drive for a week, did not get copied to the backup. It held older, working versions of the files. I had to re-reconcile my bank account, and re-enter my credit card transactions from the last statement, but that was the extent of the damage in the end.
Glad to hear that you were able to recover your data with minimal effort. Shows how important backups are! Sucks that Parallels 'Lost' your entire Windows install! Seems like there ought to be a more elegant way for the software to recover from a crash. Also seems like a poorly written application if having the machine crash while it's running will trash the install.
Posted by: Jeff Henderson | July 29, 2008 at 08:48 PM
The Microsoft Office X version of Excel works well and is easier for me to use than the Windows version. Never had a problem with portability of OS-X Excel files to Windows or the other way around. Word is a challenge in either platform but on the Mac it is easier to navigate around to undo what Word thinks you want. No dancing paper clip either.
Posted by: Bruce Nall | July 31, 2008 at 04:04 PM