The Right Stuff

Well, three weeks after my computer crashed, I’m back in the saddle again.

I shopped around for a “bare bones” system, and wound up with a Dell.  The bare-bones systems were roughly equivalent in features and price to the Dell.  One of the things that swayed me was that I could offset some of my purchase cost by selling leftover components from my old machine.  As an example, I bought a new flat screen monitor for $100.  I can probably sell my used (smaller) Dell flat screen for $30 – $50 on eBay.  There were others for sale, but the Dell name commands a price. 

I started out with the $369 system, planning to spend $500 including the monitor.  I wound up opting for the next level up for another $100.  With my Dell credit card, it will be $18 per month, with a reasonable interest rate.

Even after I received my new machine, I still comparison shopped.  I could have saved roughly $100 at Costco, but as with other suppliers, the money had to be paid all at once. 

The next level machine I ordered from Dell has a faster dual processor and much more memory than the one I first considered.  I have a stock market scanning program which is huge.  Two machines ago, my daily update took about a half hour.  My crashed machine took 15 minutes.  My new machine takes 80 seconds. 

An “oops” was that I ordered the machine with the single hard drive it came with.  To achieve the blinding speed of the new machines, each drive has its own cable, rather than plugging into a conduit cable.  I had two drives and one cable. 

That cost me $30 with tax and shipping and a delay of five days.  Fortunately, my old drive was a SATA drive like the new one, so I dug around in my crashed machine and found the SATA cable that I used until the new one arrived.  

Meanwhile, I worked on getting the new machine online with all my programs.  Yup, there they were, all on the wrong disk.  None of my stuff worked.  I downloaded a second copy of my stock scanning program, and found it to be a virgin copy.  My thousands of formulae were on the old drive.

OK, time for innovation.  I located the directory for the scanning program on the old drive, and copied directory by directory to the new drive.  Wallah!  My system was restored.

That started my thought process going.  If I can do it with one program, I can do it with all.  The shortcut references have to point to the new drive, but directory by directory I’m selectively copying all the directories from Program Files on the old disk to the same location on the new disk. 

Windows Vista came with the machine, but it leaves me uninspired, which is probably why Microsoft is coming out with Windows 7.  One of the good things about Vista is when copying a large number of files, it not only gives you a choice of which file will survive that one copy, but allows you to choose once for all similar events in that directory. 

I was going from one directory to another, overwriting all the files in Program Files on the new disk with my files of the same name in Program Files on the old disk.   I’m still working at it, but my new machine will eventually work like the old one.  I like things the way I’m used to. 

I use Microsoft Word and Excel a lot.  I tried copying the files for those programs, but ‘no go.’  I have my Office 2000 disk, so I reinstalled MS Office on my new machine.  Excel came up right away, but MS Word constantly came up without the command lines at the top, and stopped responding immediately. 

I can’t even describe my frustration.  I have reports to get out, so I used Open Office, a good alternative, but there are differences, and I was in no mood to learn a new word processor. 

Research as always, led me to the answer.  Other folks have had the same problem.  There is a 3rd-party program that interferes with MS Word.  Deleting “Microsoft Live Add-In” solved it.  

Now the only problem I have is that Live Mail did not transfer my mail, and my gmail accounts delete the mail when it is forwarded.  Oh well, back into the bytes.  I didn’t have anything to do anyway (hah).