Your best option for Quicken is to install a Windows emulator - like Parallels of VMWare Fusion - and run your Quicken in the Windows environment. Otherwise, search Mac forums for "Mac Quicken" to find much abuse of Intuit for letting the Mac version fall into such disrepair, and a multitude of alternatives. The problem is, Quicken for Windows is pretty damn good, and everything else is second class.
FYI, either application will clone your old PC - apps, files and all - so that it exists as an app on your Mac. You can boot these emulators into a window on the Mac, so I'm not talking about a dual-boot option (which is another possibility, just really inconvenient). You can even drag and drop files between the two environments, and when you go to open a Windows-only file, the Windows...erm...window will boot automatically and open the file in the appropriate app.
No need to pay for Parallels or Fusion.
VirtualBox is free and works pretty damn well. I use it all the time at home and work. You can also use a free program called
Disk2VHD to clone your old computer's hard disk into a virtual hard disk for use in VirtualBox. Unfortunately, VirtualBox does not have drag-and-drop file transfer like VMware does (there are ways to work around it using Shared Folders) but for the price tag I don't miss it.
I have Windows 7 on my work laptop, and cannot believe that MS still lets 8-year olds design their interfaces.
A lot of what I am about to quote from your post largely boils down strictly to user preference, but here we go:
It doesn't care where the mouse is, you still have to click a window before it becomes active (which is annoying when working on multiple screens.
You are the first person I have ever personally heard of that wants this behavior. Having windows automatically change focus based on where my mouse is would really screw me up (again, boils down to personal preference) and would be an absolute nightmare for pretty much all of the users I support. But, as someone mentioned, that is an "accessibility" feature that can be turned on.
Why can't I have multiple, separate, windows in the same app? It's always been true of Word, but everything else in Office (and beyond) "nests"*.
Not sure what you're referring to here. All Office apps since at least Office 2003 (except Outlook) are capable of opening separate instances for each document, and in fact that is (and has been for quite some time) the default behavior. Windows Explorer has supported multiple instances since Windows 95. For other programs I believe it is up to the developer to provide support for that, and most do.
Oh, and what the fuck happened to the list of recent files under the start button?
Disabled by default in Windows 7 in order to steer people toward using Jump Lists for most recently used programs (which actually works much better, IMO), but enabling the "Recent Items" list is just a few clicks away. Microsoft makes decisions on stuff like this based on usage statistics, so sometimes there is method to their madness. If you're in the extreme minority on a particular feature then that's just tough shit, but as with this feature in the vast majority of cases you can get old functionality back.
Ca they not take a step forward without multiple steps backwards?
Windows 7 is the best Windows OS Microsoft has released to date. A lot of the stuff that you don't like about it is strictly personal preference, and in actuality it probably wouldn't annoy you as much if you took five seconds to Google how to set it up the way you want it. Remember, right or wrong, Windows' default behavior very much caters to the lowest common denominator - non-geek home users and business users that DGAF. All of the tools are there to appease the power users like you and me, though.
You'll get no argument from me about Windows 8 though. What a disaster.
