Posts Tagged ‘windows’
Chicken and egg problem
I spent today trying to rebuild a friend’s PC after it became full of viruses, and by full I mean there were so many infected files the anti-virus software said it didn’t have room to quarantine any more files!
I reinstall the various flavours of Windows often enough that I didn’t expect too many problems, although I know I’ll always hit a bump or two along the way. Well, today’s was a real stumper: the drivers for the network card (NIC) wouldn’t work with the version of Windows I’d installed (Windows 2000) unless it also had SP3 (Service Pack = collection of Windows patches) installed, but I couldn’t download & apply SP3 without a network connection. Stalemate. Read more »
SyncToy is not in sync with Windows
I’ve been using Microsoft’s SyncToy for a few weeks now, synchronising my old(er) hard drives onto my new RAID 1 terabyte file server. It’s been working OK but every so often it will complain that a file’s path is too deep (i.e. buried too many folders down, or more likely simply that the pathname is too long) but if Windows can see the file, and SyncToy is a Windows tool, then why aren’t they using the same rules?
There is SyncToy v2.0 Beta so I’m thinking about giving that a try – it’s not clear what’s new in this version, but I’ll finish the main backups with the current version (1.4) and then give the beta a go.
Transfer wizard
My work laptop has been getting more and more sick over the past few weeks (not booting, BSOD, weird behaviour, etc.) so I finally got a “temporary” replacement yesterday – if they can convince me it’s Windows that was sick not the hardware, then I’ll swap back, but booting problems (at least) aren’t usually caused by bad o/s.
My biggest challenge is moving all my stuff to its new home – I know I’ll have to reinstall all the programs and I thought I’d just drag the data file across the network, but my concern was all the little odds and ends that Windows hides in various places like the registry. Fortunately I remembered that XP (and maybe other versions too, but these are both on XP SP2) has the “Files and Settings Transfer Wizard” – I’ve not used it before but it sounds like it’s what I want.
I kicked it off just now (5:30am!) and was pleasantly surprised to see how simple it was – start the program on both PCs, tell them whether they’re the old (source) or new (target) machine, and they just get on with transfering stuff!
I have no idea how long this will take (the progress bar is not at all helpful) but I’ve only got one charger so I’ll have to keep an eye on their battery life and swap the mains power across as needed.
We made it into the new DST and the world didn’t explode, mostly thanks to my preparations, I’m sure 
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Spring forward … in to chaos?
As everyone should know by now, (most of) Canada and the USA move to Summer Time (Daylight Saving Time) tomorrow, three weeks ahead of normal. This is causing almost as much concern as Y2K because the tech industry is equally unprepared for this change, even though Dubya pushed the legislation through almost 2 years ago – why do we leave everything to the last minute? Some people are calling this “Y2K7” … but I don’t. Read more »
