Every Silver Lining Has A Dark Cloud
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Our accountant informed me yesterday that she managed to get approval for a new computer for me. That's the good news, as my PC sucks. Try running AutoCAD, ESRI ArcInfo, or any small utility from Microsoft on a machine with only 512k RAM sometime. A newer machine would be wonderful, except for one small thing. The complex licensing schemes used by Autodesk and ESRI guarantee at least a week of lost time trying to transfer the software to the new machine. And, like all of you, I'm sure, over the years I've come to depend on numerous little tools that are scattered all over my hard drive for day to day operations. I'm going to have to locate them, find the installers, transfer everything to the new PC, and get them working again. I'm dreading it. Windows is entirely to blame for the complexity of adding a new computer to inventory. Before the inception of a Registry we could simply copy files from one PC to another, maybe add a shortcut to the home directory, and we're back in business. The concept of a central repository for program info was great, but because so much hardware dependent information is embedded in the various hives it is impossible to replicate an old drive on a new PC. Everything has to be reinstalled. I hate it. How long does it typically take you to recover from a hardware upgrade?
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
The VmWare physical to virtual tool as really turned the process of upgrading to a new computer on it's head. I've used it and it's simply excellent and entirely free: http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/[^] Use it and you can take as long as you want to slowly get your apps installed to the new computer while still being able to run the old computer much faster on the new computer.
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
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Our accountant informed me yesterday that she managed to get approval for a new computer for me. That's the good news, as my PC sucks. Try running AutoCAD, ESRI ArcInfo, or any small utility from Microsoft on a machine with only 512k RAM sometime. A newer machine would be wonderful, except for one small thing. The complex licensing schemes used by Autodesk and ESRI guarantee at least a week of lost time trying to transfer the software to the new machine. And, like all of you, I'm sure, over the years I've come to depend on numerous little tools that are scattered all over my hard drive for day to day operations. I'm going to have to locate them, find the installers, transfer everything to the new PC, and get them working again. I'm dreading it. Windows is entirely to blame for the complexity of adding a new computer to inventory. Before the inception of a Registry we could simply copy files from one PC to another, maybe add a shortcut to the home directory, and we're back in business. The concept of a central repository for program info was great, but because so much hardware dependent information is embedded in the various hives it is impossible to replicate an old drive on a new PC. Everything has to be reinstalled. I hate it. How long does it typically take you to recover from a hardware upgrade?
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
Roger Wright wrote:
How long does it typically take you to recover from a hardware upgrade?
about two full working days. All the installers I regularly use are in a folder called: common tools. Makes reinstalls a breeze. :) I crash an OS about every 2 years or so, crash it hard, and unrecoverable. I've done it on every OS I have ever had except Vista U64. Give me time.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
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Our accountant informed me yesterday that she managed to get approval for a new computer for me. That's the good news, as my PC sucks. Try running AutoCAD, ESRI ArcInfo, or any small utility from Microsoft on a machine with only 512k RAM sometime. A newer machine would be wonderful, except for one small thing. The complex licensing schemes used by Autodesk and ESRI guarantee at least a week of lost time trying to transfer the software to the new machine. And, like all of you, I'm sure, over the years I've come to depend on numerous little tools that are scattered all over my hard drive for day to day operations. I'm going to have to locate them, find the installers, transfer everything to the new PC, and get them working again. I'm dreading it. Windows is entirely to blame for the complexity of adding a new computer to inventory. Before the inception of a Registry we could simply copy files from one PC to another, maybe add a shortcut to the home directory, and we're back in business. The concept of a central repository for program info was great, but because so much hardware dependent information is embedded in the various hives it is impossible to replicate an old drive on a new PC. Everything has to be reinstalled. I hate it. How long does it typically take you to recover from a hardware upgrade?
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
After having to reinstall XP four times in the past six months (turned out to be an incompatibility between nForce4 and SATA) I gotten it down fairly well. The single biggest problem are those applications, like Firefox, which don't have a way to save the current settings. (Office 2003 had a marvelous tool to do this as does Visual Studio 2005.) A big time saver was giving up using a local email client and just using yahoo mail and gmail. The registry has created problems, but they already existed or am I the only one who remembers how programs would pile stuff into system.ini and win.ini? Or stick their .ini file in the windows directory? Or those apps which still insist on placing data in the program directories. And then there were the dongles. Still exist, but aren't nearly as prolific as in years past. And what about software that not only uses a dongle, but node locks to a mac address?
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke