It’s about frelling time

Everybody loves the idea of a new PC. Power! Speed! A keyboard not covered with grime!

But what everyone hates is the idea of moving to a new PC. Reinstalling all the aps. Reconfiguring all the aps. Pulling down the latest updates for all the aps. Copying over the data. Trying to remember all the registry tweaks you had. It is just as painful as moving into a new house, and for many of the same reasons.

Back in the Good Old Days, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and we upgraded machines by firelight, it was simple. Applications were self-contained in their own directories. Data was usually right there with them. Back it up, copy it in. Faboo.

But Micro$oft and the other software manufacturers have made things a lot more difficult. Program installations scatter files across dozens of directories, both their own and in the OS. Registry entries get added, deleted, changed. Data may reside with documents, it may reside with the program, it may reside in a database someplace else.

Part of this has been for the sake of efficiency, as programs can (in theory) call on common OS routines, and settings can be shared between aps. Part it has also been an explicit attempt to not make it easy to move aps from one PC to another. After all, that way software piracy lies …

Still, the agony of moving to a new PC is very real, and it’s real enough (and costly enough, in labor and lost productivity) that it keeps people and companies from upgrade as frequently as they might. And as frequently as hardware and software vendors would like them to.

Well, at long last, the big boys — the ones who stand to profit if folks actually find migrations painless — are beginning to listen.