Quicken Backup (Part 2)

I understand. I also live alone and thus I'm the only one using the computer. However I live in an apartment and while not necessarily likely, handymen can come into my apartment and might know a thing or two about computers. If I foolishly leave it as "Hey I'm the admin and only person here and no I don't need no stinking passwords" there's really nothing stopping them, nor somebody who say breaks into my apartment or steals my computer, from being "God" and doing whatever they want. IOW you should at least password protect your computer.

Just letting you know...

Don wrote: Sorry. I was just trying to make a point that I am the only one using this computer and so the Administrator and the user are all the same person, as well as the Authenticated User.

After a lot of thought I chose "Users" and gave myself permission to write to the external hard drives. It worked and my thanks to you. I understand. I also live alone and thus I'm the only one using the computer. However I live in an apartment and while not necessarily likely, handymen can come into my apartment and might know a thing or two about computers. If I foolishly leave it as "Hey I'm the admin and only person here and no I don't need no stinking passwords" there's really nothing stopping them, nor somebody who say breaks into my apartment or steals my computer, from being "God" and doing whatever they want. IOW you should at least password protect your computer.

Just letting you know...

-- Andrew DeFaria Ask not for whom the bell tolls. Let the machine get it.

of 3 articles but has never given me #2 and #3. Oh well..

It is probably doing something that requires raised privileges. Talk to Intuit about that. Or turn off UAC by first going here and carefully studying that page then going then here ...

Here's how you turn off UAC and all those prompts, but I thinks it's very unwise to do so:

Control Panel ->

User Accounts and Family Safety ->

User Accounts ->

Turn User Account Control on of off ->

uncheck "Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer" and click OK

The purpose of UAC is to prevent your "user account" from performing potentially dangerous operations without your explicit permission. If a virus infects your computer it can wreak havoc by damaging critical system files and resources while running in the background using your "user account" permissions. But with UAC turned on you can see the prompt, recognize that you didn't start a privileged operation, deny the operation and then take steps to disinfect your computer.

If you want to give up this protection, I've shown you how.

Glad you got things working. Andrew amazes me at how quickly he got to the heart of this problem.

Jerry

Been on the net 24/7 since 1998. No A/V at all. Only use the built in firewall in XP. Never, I repeat NEVER, got a virus. How did I managed to accomplish that? Simple, don't use MS products like Outlook and Office. And don't do stupid things like opening up attachments. Finally, write a good spam filter... (Keeps the phishing crap out among other things... Ah still dealing with 4000-5000 emails a days...)

By and large I'm convinced that a lot of viruses are figments of the users imagination in that something else happened and the user is too confused to know what it is so he claims it's a virus. For example, this little problem here could have easily been classified as a virus but luckily hasn't been.

This is not to say that viruses do not exist. They do. However the UAC stuff that MS has put in is probably stupid (I say properly because I'm not running Vista or UAC). At work they attempt to limit what you can do to the PC for the same reasons - concerns about viruses and the like. It's such that I cannot, for example, defrag my disk drive because I'm not admin. Hmmm... How exactly is that a security violation?

Do it the cat way! Sit back. Observe. Think.... then pounce!

Seriously though, 25 years in the business helps I guess....

I think you're right.

It looks like the difference between regular users and administrative users is that only the latter are members of the Administrators "group" (UNIX terminology).

With UAC turned off they get Administrators group permissions, whenever needed, without a prompt.

With UAC turned on they get a prompt that allows them to deny access to Administrators group permissions.

I don't think Vista administrators are equivalent to the UNIX root user. My Vista login has "Administrators" privileges, but not "SYSTEM" privileges. A UNIX root user can do anything - including installing a virus under your login :-)

Not really. Windows uses the term "group" too. There are local groups and global groups.

If they do not have administrator group privileges (i.e. a plain Jane user), then I don't believe that UAC grants them such privileges. I believe you'd need to actually do RunAs. (Unix equivalents: su or sudo).

If they are in the administrators group then I think Vista's UAC on will prompt while UAC off will not prompt.

As well as restore your files or install an application that is really worth your while, etc. Root user's are not inherently bad (as I am often running as root and I have, very often, saved many people's butts doing so).

Thanks for the info, but I learned how to turn UAC off. However, I DO NOT want to turn it off. I think it's a pretty good idea to pop up a screen if it's going to prevent a program from running that I did not originate or want to run. I can learn to live with those pop ups as they don't really happen that often.

I'm not really too concerned about getting a virus. Like Andrew, I have not had a problem with any viruses in my 17 years of personal computing. They have gotten into my computer, but I've always had a good virus program to catch them before doing any harm. I am presently using AVG Pro and have been using it for about 5 years. I started out with their Free program, but now pay for their excellent service.

I am still reading and LEARNING about Vista. It's going to take a while to understand it (maybe never) ha.

The important thing is THAT I GOT MY QUICKEN BACKUPS working. My Quicken data file goes all the way back to 1993. I probably should archive a lot of that data, but it's nice to have that much data when I want to find (and get a history) of certain expenditures. I'm a great one for keeping records of things that are important to me. Before Quicken I used a checking program that wasn't as popular as Quicken. As of 6 months ago I am using Quicken Medical Expense Manager. I kept most of my medical expense data in Excel and in Access database. But I'm hoping Quicken can do a better job.

I keep a history of important information which includes every purchase and for years I have kept every transaction on my MasterCard and VISA account. I keep this in an Excel file. So now that I am charging purchases with my VISA card, sometimes I have to search Quicken (for purchases paid by check) and my Excel file for charged purchases. My data file goes back to 1990 and I backup that data file every night onto an external hard drive and a monthly backup to another hard drive (2 separate hard drives) K: and L:

Anyhow, backups are very important to me and I'm happy and grateful to all of you on this board who have offered their time and expertise in getting my Quicken backups to my external hard drives. I have backups to all 3 hard drives and if one would become defective, I've got my data backed up on another hard drive.

I've used news groups before, but am very surprised to find so many knowledgeable people on this one. I used to belong to Prodigy and they had their own bulletin boards with knowledgeable moderators. It was WONDERFUL. Too bad there isn't something like that now. That's why I said I was so surprised to find so much help here. It's almost like the good ol days of Prodigy.

Thank you all very much.

Don Crislip Vienna, West Virginia

I think I'm beginning to see what's going on with this Vista UAC stuff.

When you add a user account you get 2 user IDs, one with standard privileges and one with administrative privileges, both associated with the same logon.

I highly doubt that. When you install Vista an Administrator user is created. This is the same as the root user in Unix terms. You also create a non administrative user that you normally log in as (Let's assume Don's regular, non administrative user is named... well... Don).

I think you're right.

It looks like the difference between regular users and administrative users is that only the latter are members of the Administrators "group" (UNIX terminology).

Not really. Windows uses the term "group" too. There are local groups and global groups.

I didn't know the Windows term so I used the UNIX term with which I was familiar and that I knew you would understand too.

With UAC turned off they get Administrators group permissions, whenever needed, without a prompt.

With UAC turned on they get a prompt that allows them to deny access to Administrators group permissions.

If they do not have administrator group privileges (i.e. a plain Jane user), then I don't believe that UAC grants them such privileges. I believe you'd need to actually do RunAs. (Unix equivalents: su or sudo).

I never meant to imply that UAC would ever grant you permission for any groups to which you didn't belong. We agree.

If they are in the administrators group then I think Vista's UAC on will prompt while UAC off will not prompt.

That's exactly what I originally said, so I guess we agree here too.

I don't think Vista administrators are equivalent to the UNIX root user. My Vista login has "Administrators" privileges, but not "SYSTEM" privileges. A UNIX root user can do anything - including installing a virus under your login :-)

As well as restore your files or install an application that is really worth your while, etc. Root user's are not inherently bad (as I am often running as root and I have, very often, saved many people's butts doing so).

I wasn't making a negative comment about root privileges. I was just jokingly referring to your haughty comment that you had never had a virus. The implication was that if I were a root user on your system, and you pissed me off, your record of never having had a virus might be finito. I realize, of course, that retaliation would be swift and severe.

-- Andrew DeFaria I put instant coffee in my microwave oven and almost went back in time.

X-Newsreader: Microsoft Windows Mail 6.0.6000.16480

so horrible at handling quoted material? Just trying to be like crappy Outlook? ;-)

so horrible at handling quoted material? Just trying to be like crappy Outlook? ;-)

-- Andrew DeFaria Today I dialed a wrong number....The other side said, "Hello?" and I said, "Hello, could I speak to Joey?" They said," Uh, I don't think so...He's only two months old." I said, "I'll wait..."

so horrible at handling quoted material? Just trying to be like crappy Outlook? ;-) After looking at that huge bold type I see what you were complaining about. It makes even responding in all caps look polite.

Is this better?

-- Andrew DeFaria Today I dialed a wrong number....The other side said, "Hello?" and I said, "Hello, could I speak to Joey?" They said," Uh, I don't think so...He's only two months old." I said, "I'll wait..."

How about both of you using plain text instead of HTML and specify indenting the message plus a ">". That makes it easier to read too.

X-Newsreader: Microsoft Windows Mail 6.0.6000.16480 so horrible at handling quoted material? Just trying to be like crappy Outlook? ;-) After looking at that huge bold type I see what you were complaining about. It makes even responding in all caps look polite.

Is this better?

-- Andrew DeFaria Today I dialed a wrong number....The other side said, "Hello?" and I said, "Hello, could I speak to Joey?" They said," Uh, I don't think so...He's only two months old." I said, "I'll wait..."

How about you STFU? Or perhaps get some decent news reading software. This is the 21st century even if you appear to be stuck in the 60's. Time to grow up little girl. I have no desire to be LCD for you.

"And this is good?" ( The mess that I made of my reply to your post is probably more a

And MS's ignorance...

Hence my comment that Windows Mail (Outlook Express++) is so horrible at handling quoted material. IOW it does little to help you.

Yeah, remove it and install Thunderbird! ;-)

You had to install Windows Mail (even if it came with Vista - you did install Vista didn't you?) and you've taken the time to learn to use a non-decent mail handler....

I don't despise Agent - I just haven't seen the need to install it. Thunderbird does NNTP and I'm happy enough with it. I do despise the concept of ownership, which implies purchase, especially when there are tons of freeware and open source software that quite often do the job better. Aside from being a cheap ass, I just hate it when you spend good money on something and then have to continue to spend, spend, spend while getting crappy support... Hmmm... Sorta sounds like Quicken... Well it is. I've looked into Gnucash, again, recently and it still doesn't do a good enough job WRT online banking.

There are a number of better ways to get large binaries than using NNTP and piecing together parts to hopefully reassemble the whole. Bittorrents and various P2P networks. I know. Look at my server! I have a lot of media.

Laura,

I agree with you wholeheartedly.

I always post in plain text and reply to plain text posts in plain text. Deciding how to reply to HTML posts has always been a problem for me.

In addition, I usually bottom post my replies or intersperse my comments. However, if others in a thread are top-posting, then I also top-post. If a thread contains both top and bottom posts, I usually top-post so that my reply can be seen above the hopeless clutter below.

If I reply to some of Andrew's posts in plain text with Windows Mail, it makes an absolute mess of things, especially if I want to intersperse comments.

Surely you know that trying to get Andrew to change is hopeless. If he were sitting on God's throne and God asked him to get up, I doubt that he would budge :-)

Given that constraint I'd like to make my replies to him as readable as possible. He has a lot to contribute. I know I've learned a lot from him and, for me at least, it's worth trying to accommodate him as best I can.

Jerry

P.S. If you can convince Andrew to change I'll buy both of you a steak dinner!

Jerry Boyle wrote: I see a little HTML in newsgroups and in my private email, but not enough to warrant taking the time to install and learn to use a decent mail handler. You had to install Windows Mail (even if it came with Vista - you did install Vista didn't you?) and you've taken the time to learn to use a non-decent mail handler....

Nope. My old computer gave up the ghost and new PCs come with Vista and Windows Mail. I didn't have to learn Windows Mail - it's essentially identical to OE, even its user interface. I agree - it is a POS.

I didn't want to have to learn Vista either. All they did was move things around so you can't find them anymore and provide extra security protection that even I, Windows idiot that I am, don't need.

I do own Agent, which you probably also despise, I don't despise Agent - I just haven't seen the need to install it. Thunderbird does NNTP and I'm happy enough with it. I do despise the concept of ownership, which implies purchase, especially when there are tons of freeware and open source software that quite often do the job better. Aside from being a cheap ass, I just hate it when you spend good money on something and then have to continue to spend, spend, spend while getting crappy support... Hmmm... Sorta sounds like Quicken... Well it is. I've looked into Gnucash, again, recently and it still doesn't do a good enough job WRT online banking.

but I've only used it for downloading large binaries and haven't set it up on my new computer yet. There are a number of better ways to get large binaries than using NNTP and piecing together parts to hopefully reassemble the whole. Bittorrents and various P2P networks. I know. Look at my server! I have a lot of media.

Not a problem for the few binaries I deal with. And Agent 4.2 supports NZB files, which piece together all the parts for you. I do wish I knew how to use bittorrents but for the volume I deal with it's not worth the trouble to learn how. I've never had a very good memory and I've reached the point in life where, for every new useful thing I learn, I forget at least two other useful things that I previously knew. So I have to ration my age- and alcohol-depleted supply of brain cells.

-- Andrew DeFaria I am in shape. Round is a shape!

Andrew, I have used Outlook Express and now Windows Mail for such a long time. However, Windows Mail seems really slow on my new computer so would I try Thunderbird?

I'd like very much to download and give it a try. But you know me, I don't want to mess up anything that I already have that is working fine (but a little too slow).

Can I try it without messing up my Windows Mail and if I don't like it, can I simply start using Windows Mail again? (Of course, I'm assuming I can use it without Mozilla).

:Don

It has some changes and improvements, one being that it doesn't try to force top posting as OE did.

You can also turn off HTML before posting to newsgroups the same as you could in OE, by clicking on Tools/Options and select the "Send" tab, check Plain Text for News sending format.

Doing so would be much appreciated, thanks!