Quicken - Halfway to Freedom

Today a big hurdle was cleared.  I've used Quicken for decades.  I have more accounts (many closed) and transactions stored than I care to count.  Quicken provides a few important functions in my financial life:

• Banking
• Reconcile my bank accounts to make sure I don't overdraw
• Categorize transactions for taxes (not so much to track spending)
• Search for transactions (often related to spending, taxes etc)
• Investing
• I like to track my investments independent of my brokerage firm mainly to make sure I have the cost basis in the event I ever switch. 

For the Banking functions I have switched to CountAbout which is on the cloud.  It's not perfect, but it does what I need and importantly I was able to upload all my data from Quicken to it and it was pretty easy.  It also gets transactions from my financial institutions (banks and credit card companies).

The next step is to check out some tools to replace Quicken's investing function.

You've got mail

A few days in.  Haven't given up.  Still optimistic.   Mail has been the primary issue.  I have a bunch of email addresses but only really care about a couple.  The one I use for work hasn't been a problem because there's a very good web mail client for that.  It feels very similar to Outlook which is what I've been using.  My personal email is now going to gmail.  Not sure I like it as much.  I'm starting to deal with labels instead of folders.  Will see how that goes.  I will say Google's search function is (not surprisingly) great.

The current concern is moving emails stored on my Windows machine in Outlook to the web.  The first step is to clean up the folders. 

I've also succeeded in printing which was easy.  What's more I can scan from my HP Officejet easily just by putting its IP address in my browser.

Hooking up 1 external monitor was easy.  Haven't figured out how to connect 2 external monitors.  Stay tuned.

What the hell is this blog about?

This blog documents my fantasy of ditching my Windows machine and using a Chromebook for both my personal and work lives.   Maybe I'll ascend to the cloud like an angel (hence aspiring angle) or remain bound to the Earth.  Perhaps this blog will help someone considering or trying to move from Windows.

Why am I doing this? 

• The main reason is for disaster recovery.  Even though I backup daily, if my Windows machine fails, it will take time to reinstall the software such as Outlook, Office, Quicken and such.  Would think it would be easier with a Chromebook.
• I think it will be cheaper in the end in both hardware and software costs, though I am not sure.
• With respect to my work, I have a small business and we do not have a dedicated IT person.  It seems having everything on the cloud would make it easier to replicate the employee experience.
• Might be fun (for a minute or two).

Expected hurdles.  On my PC I have some applications that I expect will be hard to port.  These include Quicken, R (RStudio), and Excel due to files with macros.  No doubt unforeseen hurdles will present themselves.

What have I done so far?  I bought an HP Chromebook from BestBuy, specifically the HP - 2-in-1 14" Touch-Screen Chromebook - Intel Core i3 - 8GB Memory - 64GB eMMC Flash Memory - White, Slate Model:14-DA0011DX, SKU:6301869.  This was about $350 on the recent Black Friday sale.  

I've been taking a course on JavaScript from CodeCademy with the idea that I can use this to replace my Google macros (functions).