All in the name of progress...
Regular followers of my blog will notice I haven't been posting very much in recent months. This is because I've been upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 Pro. First of all, I borrowed a Windows 7 PC to see just what software would and wouldn't work and after a few weeks of testing, I had my new PC built.
Leaving Outlook Express behind in favour of Mozilla Thunderbird was a culture-shock - I've heavily customised the program to look as close to OE as I could get.
I also hate the so-called ClearType (it should be called fuzzy-type) which Microsoft force on to their users and so I have removed this as far as possible. However, there isn't a way that I could find to get rid of it in Internet Explorer and so I've switched to Mozilla Firefox as my main browser.
I missed my XP start menu and so I installed the wonderful Classic Shell program - incidentally, a must-have for Windows 8 users in my opinion.
My web design program had to be updated too, as well as many more programs and some I've had to resign to the bin as they no longer work on Windows 7.
All this and then I finally had to look at my family tree software. Having tried Legacy, RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker 2014, Ancestral Quest and Family Historian, I hit a snag with every one of them. Some were too complicated for my liking but my main issue was after exporting a GEDCOM file to run through the program which generates my family web pages, I found facts listed in the wrong order and even children and wives in the wrong order too.
I eventually settled on resorting to my old and trusty Family Tree Maker 2006 program, but not before having to download a patch file first. I'm aware that reports can't be exported to PDF documents on a 64 bit machine. Although there is a work-around by using a third party program such as PDF995, this doesn't allow for single page outputs of charts. I shall probably have to export a GEDCOM and import it into FTM 2014 and produce the chart from there. I'm not so keen on the chart layouts in the 2014 program and it's more bother than before.
And so, in the name of progress, I feel Microsoft have put me through the ringer somewhat without me gaining anything, other than an operating system which will hopefully be supported for some time to come.
Leaving Outlook Express behind in favour of Mozilla Thunderbird was a culture-shock - I've heavily customised the program to look as close to OE as I could get.
I also hate the so-called ClearType (it should be called fuzzy-type) which Microsoft force on to their users and so I have removed this as far as possible. However, there isn't a way that I could find to get rid of it in Internet Explorer and so I've switched to Mozilla Firefox as my main browser.
I missed my XP start menu and so I installed the wonderful Classic Shell program - incidentally, a must-have for Windows 8 users in my opinion.
My web design program had to be updated too, as well as many more programs and some I've had to resign to the bin as they no longer work on Windows 7.
All this and then I finally had to look at my family tree software. Having tried Legacy, RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker 2014, Ancestral Quest and Family Historian, I hit a snag with every one of them. Some were too complicated for my liking but my main issue was after exporting a GEDCOM file to run through the program which generates my family web pages, I found facts listed in the wrong order and even children and wives in the wrong order too.
I eventually settled on resorting to my old and trusty Family Tree Maker 2006 program, but not before having to download a patch file first. I'm aware that reports can't be exported to PDF documents on a 64 bit machine. Although there is a work-around by using a third party program such as PDF995, this doesn't allow for single page outputs of charts. I shall probably have to export a GEDCOM and import it into FTM 2014 and produce the chart from there. I'm not so keen on the chart layouts in the 2014 program and it's more bother than before.
And so, in the name of progress, I feel Microsoft have put me through the ringer somewhat without me gaining anything, other than an operating system which will hopefully be supported for some time to come.
Category: General