Well, I wound up getting a parking ticket Friday at work - miserable Syracuse! I'm going to fight it. I finally have my car dug our and unstuck. Hurray! Now we can use some sunny weather. I'm glad to here there's crocuses blooming just to the south of us. Hope everyone is enjoying their seeds. Donna & Spoonietreasure, your seeds will be going out tomorrow.

I wanted to update, I just read here about an open office program, but from reading that, I am now worried my old doc need to be all converted to the new office 2007. I saved money buying the student version so it only like 120 dollars on Amazon, but the full version with outlook is super expensive. I never liked outlook. I use gmail and windows calander. It's a new calander on vista. Any suggestions will be appreciated. When I get the new office 2007 student can I help my friend out by reading her old apple files? Will it be able to read apples files, because I heard the newer windows and apple would be compatable. She has some old apple files, she can't read on her new apple computer.

I like all my own data saved inside their respective folders I have created in My Documents (Documents for Win7). That way I can easily back up all my data at any time to the external drive without necessarily creating an image. Once you have installed the program copy your own data folder that you had saved prior to wiping the drive for that program to My Documents. Then Open the program and probably look in Tools/Options or Preferences to change where the program saves and point to your saved folder. In MS Office 2007 Word for example you click the MS icon in the top left corner, click Word options at the bottom of the drop down menu and make any changes you wish.

Being from another country, this idea may be out to lunch as far as the U.S. is concerned, but for those in Canada, they may need to keep a record of regular or occasional payouts made by mutual funds, which payouts must be considered income in the year received. If their mutual fund makes payouts in cash, those amounts are added to income in the year received, and taxed then, and that is the end of it. But with many mutual funds, they tell us of the amounts declared as income year by year - but those amounts are re-invested. When one sells an asset, one must account for the capital gain, i.e. deduct the cost of purchase from the amount realized on sale to learn the amount of the gain, on part of which one is taxable in the year of sale. When I bought a stock that pays dividends, usually they are paid in cash, so I must declare them as income in the year received and pay tax on them ... but the amounts paid out are not added to the asset. When I sell such a stock, the total amount invested is the amount that they cost me in the first place, so I deduct that amount from the amount realized when I sold them, to find the capital gain, on which I am taxed in the year of sale. Some stocks allow me to re-invest the dividends to purchase more stock (sometimes at a discounted price). When I choose to do that, when I sell the stocks, the amount that they cost me is not only the amount of the original purchase, but includes the various amounts reinvested over the years. Which means that I must have a record of all of those transactions, including each of the amounts renvested, in order to calculate the cost price(s) to deduct from the proceeds of sale, in order to calculate the capital gain. If I neglect to do so, and claim only the amount of the original purchase, I lose the credit for all of those amounts invested later, on which I paid tax at the time, so I need to pay tax on those reinvested payouts again, thus pay tax twice on those amounts. For example, I bought a stock 44 years ago, that has paid dividends for each one of those years ... which was received in cash, so I dealt with those amounts at the time, but they did not buy any more of that stock directly, so they have no effect on the amount that I paid for those stocks. If I had had some of those dividends reivested, I'd have needed to have kept track of all of those reinvested amounts, in order to calculate my actual total cost, thus my capital gain. As many mutual fund owners choose to have their payouts reinvested at the time, to buy more funds, they need to keep track of each of those amounts, to calculate their actual cost of the asset. Sometimes brokers or management companies keep track of those amounts, or order to calculate the average cost per share ... but it is risky to count on such records having been kept ... or being complete (especially if funds were merged with others, as often happens, especially with funds that have a bad growtth record). Lose those records ... and you may well pay tax twice of those reinvested amounts. ole joyful