Using MS Money with Nationwide Online Banking after sync service stopped

It took me a month to get around to checking why my MS Money 2005 was no longer directly syncing with Nationwide – and so I found, like many others, that Nationwide have discontinued the service after Microsoft terminated support.

Since the only other option for electronic format that Nationwide offer is a plain CSV of the transactions on the screen in  web-banking, some workarounds are needed. Fortunately, quite a few people have been looking at this, and there’s a tool (MT2OFX) to convert the CSV to OFX (which MSMoney supports), combined with some scripts specific to Nationwide accounts. A recent discussion in MoneySavingExpert covers how to set it all up. Note there are updated scripts for both Nationwide and CC here.

Since this method does not have unique IDs for the transactions, it will overlap/duplicate any that were brought in via the direct sync. However, you can delete those, and from then on, it’ll work fine. Thanks to specifying your own dates on Nationwide (except Credit Cards, which export in monthly statements), you can set the precise date of your last sync, and limit it to a handful of duplicates.

From what I can see, the main detail is there, and Money continues to auto-classify as before. It’s a pain – I have 5 accounts, and you have to select dates and export each in turn – but it’ll do until I move to another bank.

Altec Lansing 903 Headphones – Lost a Ear Gel

So, this is the part they don’t tell you….

I lost an ear gel the other day. They’re cheap pieces of rubber that pop off, and one of them had popped off – never to be found again. Not a problem, I thought – it should be quite cheap to buy spares.

Nope.

It might be cheap – if you could actually buy them! But ebay don’t do them, Altec Lansing and Plantronics don’t do then… No-one does them.

I’ve emailed Altec Lansing support, and they *did* say “No problem, we’ll post you some replacements”. It was a US support tech, however, so I’m waiting to hear his response when he sees my UK postal address.

Reply from Gigabyte Technical Support on the problems installing Windows 7 64-bit

Although the problem is now fixed, I have had this reply from Gigabyte (which took around a week):

 

Are you upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7?

Do you have alternate HDD or Windows 7 copy to test?

Please try to reset the CMOS -
1) Disconnect the power cord from the power supply. Remove the CMOS battery (the flat silver disk) from the motherboard using a srew drive or similar implement. Leave it out for a minute or two, then replace it and power on the system. The BIOS settings should have been reset, allowing the computer to boot.
2) Go into the BIOS – “Load optimized default”
3) Save settings and exit.
4) If this doesn’t work then try “Load Failsafe default”

 

So.. judging from the generic approach, I would say it’s not a well known problem, by them at least. But it’s another option to try out – resetting the CMOS. I have read this on a forum elsewhere as well, although I’m not sure if this means it’s a trusted method, or whether they just had the same generic reply from Gigabyte Tech Support!