I’ve been dying lately without having access to MS Money. Microsoft has conceded the personal finance software market to Intuit and decided to stop supporting MS Money. I was pretty heart broken since MS Money helped me turn my finances around. I went down to Office Max yesterday and finally bought a copy of Quicken 2007 for the iMac. Intuit is releasing Quicken 2010 for Mac in February but I couldn’t wait. I haven’t been feeling so hot without knowing my bottom line for the last few weeks. I tried to use the old checkbook register but I still like to see forecasts and play with the charts and graphs. I’m still getting used to my gigantic California mortgage and use the forecasts as a crutch to see what the consequences of my spending are. I know you can do this in Excel or Numbers but I didn’t want to spend the hours to get a temporary system up and running.

Like our printer, it looks like Quicken 2007 doesn’t work out of the box with Snow Leopard. It wasn’t immediately obvious either since everything installed correctly. I was getting frustrated when I couldn’t get a single one of my accounts to load. I would follow the recommended instructions and let Quicken try and set them up over the web and would constantly get an OL-249 error. I thought I was doing everything right too and was about to start calling Chase, ING, and Charles Schwab for the, “key” it kept asking for.

I searched a few Apple forums, did some Googling and it looks like I’m not the only one perturbed by the incompatibility with Snow Leopard. I felt like I threw $70.00 out the window and was getting really mad. I was about to go 0 for 2 on the new iMac!! First the printer was incompatible, now my personal finance software doesn’t work. So much for, “it just works”. After scrounging around on Intuit’s Quicken page, I found two patches: R2 and R3. They fix the OL-249 error. I downloaded them both, installed them and now I can now incorporate most of my accounts into Quicken. At first glance it seems as if MS Money supports/supported more financial institutions then Quicken does. I don’t see Banana Republic, GE Money Bank, or my 401k provider in the list. I guess I have to play with it some more. For those of you looking for the Snow Leopard patches for Quicken 2007 for Mac, go here:

http://quicken.intuit.com/support/articles/using-quicken/patches-and-updates/4366.html

These aren’t easy to find on Intuit’s page either. Let me know if this works for you since it did for me. What I’m really not liking about the iMac is that I have to research the software I want to buy before I buy it to make sure it’s compatible with Snow Leopard. Just because the box says, “compatible with OS v10.3.9 or later” doesn’t necessarily mean 10.6.2.

So the wife and I broke down and bought an iMac and a new printer for Christmas. We decided that it would be our present to ourselves, which worked out nicely since we’ve both been lusting for one ever since we saw them at Best Buy. Out of the box my first impressions were pretty good. It’s sleek, compact, and has a killer screen. The wireless keyboard and mouse are super slick. My only nit with the keyboard is that it doesn’t have a ten key. My wife lives and dies by the ten key so I may have to change that out. I saw Apple sells one but it doesn’t appear to be wireless. I guess another nit would be that I can’t find the IBM version of the “delete” key. The Apple keyboard has a key called “delete” but works like the IBM “backspace”. There’s probably a way to erase the next character using the Apple keyboard, but I just don’t know it.

The iMac takes up significantly less space than the Dell and it frees us from Windows Vista. We bought the middle grade version since Best Buy ran out of the entry level iMacs. Our computer desk and office are pretty small so the larger 27” screen would have been too big.

For the printer, we bought a Canon MX860 and its setup has been a nightmare. We bought the Canon MX860 since it had was a scanner, printer, had a fax capability, and was wireless. I can’t remember the last time I needed a fax but I do know when I needed it, I really needed it. We are also trying to keep a clean office for once so the idea was to put the printer somewhere that was out of the way. I figured with Apple advertising that, “everything just works” it would be pretty simple. Just plug it in and go. Well... not really.

Our iMac was shipped with OS X 10.6.2. I didn’t know this, but that means “Snow Leopard”. It sounds cool at least. The background picture is cute and Snow Leopard sounds less menacing than Tiger or Panther. For Canon though, Snow Leopard meant not compatible with 10.6.2, at least out of the box... sort of. The drivers that come with Snow Leopard support USB capability, but not wireless. Since the entire point of buying the Canon was to use wireless, this ticked me off. After some fiddling around, reading lots of help message boards, and re-reading the manual a few times it is now working. For those of you in the same boat I was in, here is what I did:

1. Put the CD Canon gives you away. It’s worthless.

2. Go to Canon’s website and find the page associated with the PIXMA MX860.

3. Go to “Drivers and Downloads”.

4. Select the right OS, “OS X” and scroll down to “Software”. Skip the “Drivers” section altogether. I played in this section for a while and didn’t get anywhere. Your mileage may vary since I don’t know what I’m doing.

5. Download and install all the English applications approved for 10.6. I downloaded Easy-Photo-Print EX, MP Navigator EX, Canon PIXMA Wireless Setup Assistant, Solutions Menu, and IJ Network Tool. The Wireless Assistant doesn’t do much other than show you what your settings are which you should probably know since you’re trying to setup your printer on your network.

6. Some of the applications may ask you to restart the computer. I said ok and everything worked.

7. After you install the IJ Network Tool you’ll be asked to input your network settings. Follow the instructions and select your network. If you really don’t know what your setup is, run the Wireless Assistant. It will tell you.

8. Once you complete the, “is-the-printer-too-far-away” step and you add the printer to your network and your printer list, WAIT for the second Canon MX860 to show up in your printer list. It takes a few seconds. I screwed this up a couple times. I didn’t wait for the second printer to show up and was only set up to print via USB. This was confusing since I did the wireless setup several times. Everything was talking, the printer was nice and close, but I couldn’t print. The only reason I caught this was because my wife was talking to me the last time and when I turned to look, there was a second printer with an associated MAC address. Aha!

9. Print a test page using the wireless. Put the printer where you want it to live and print another test page.

This may have been the round about way to do this, but it worked for me. Let me know if this works for you! Good luck.