http://xkcd.com/528/
Okay, I did not even try to install Vista, let alone Windows 7. I just tried a plain vanilla reinstall of Windows XP Pro, and it has taken the better part of a week to reconstruct my computing environment. And yes, I do have a Mac! My Mac is the all-important second PC. If it weren’t for clients needing me to work with their Windows QuickBooks and Quicken files, I would gladly have switched to the Mac as my computing platform long ago.
In the spirit of Umberto Eco’s Infinity of Lists (interview here), and because I don’t want to die, here’s a list of lessons learned the hard way:
- make note of important browser bookmarks,
- realize that remote backup software like Carbonite will try to restore EVERYTHING, including all of the crapola stuff you don’t want copied back to your nice clean PC, and that manually selecting what you want to restore via the remote backup is time consuming and error prone–better to just save the folders you really want to an external drive and then copy those back,
- store your QuickBooks file in the same folder structure as client files–totally forgot it was in a different place and wiped it out,
- sigh with relief that you remembered to back up QuickBooks to an external drive each and every time you used it,
- don’t bother wasting time uninstalling each application before reinstalling Windows, just be sure to locate all product ids, codes, etc. before uninstalling, as these numbers usually can be obtained from the software as long as it remains installed,
- upgrade Windows to the latest Service Pack before reinstalling applications requiring it,
- make a note of the router password–this is different in some cases than the password needed to add a PC to the wireless network, e.g., in the case of Netgear,
- be thankful that you were able to remember the router password after trying about 10 different ones so you didn’t have to reset the router back to its factory default settings,
- remember that running Windows via Parallels on the Mac is not the same as running Windows on a dedicated Windows machine. There are known issues and I’ve experienced problems such as no file sharing or printing via the wireless network, applications not working as expected, and so on, and
- don’t forget to save your Outlook.pst file, in my case located in C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Blech. I hate Windows, but yeah, it’s a necessity if you work in the business world in any capacity. I used Windows all through grad school and learned enough to know I never want to go back, if I can avoid it.
@abdpbt yes, biz people are stuck with Windows, but one benefit of this experience is that I kind of rearranged my work flows so I do more of my work on my MacBook Pro, including running some of my Windows apps on it via Parallels. Windows running on the Mac via Parallels seems even faster than Windows on a native machine, but per my post, Parallels has some issues so it’s not a complete replacement. But it’s close, and apparently getting better with each version.