So a couple of weeks back, Jim and Ginger’s PC went south with a fried motherboard. This wouldn’t have been the end of the world (since I was coming out in a couple of weeks), save that all the preliminary KOA work was locked up on that machine. Gah!
Well, longish story short, they went out and got a new machine, and got their old hard drive loaded into an external chassis so that they could get their files.
One of the big challenges was that their mail was stuck on the old hard drive in Outlook Express. We got them pointing to their mail account via mail2web.com until I could get out there, but that had some serious limitations.
As of last night, I think I’ve got them set up for their new path forward.
1. I have them running now in Gmail as their main client, with their legacy domain address routing automagically to Gmail.
2. I got Gmail to see the old Windows Address Book on their old drive, so all of their contacts have been imported in.
3. With a fair number of gyrations, I managed to get the Windows Mail system (yes, they’re running Vista, alas) to import their old Outlook Express stuff, so they can now see their legacy mail if they need to.
Woot!
I also, in the process, got sick and tired of IE7+Vista, so I loaded up Firefox 3 for them. Yay!
I am, btw, heartily sick of Vista already. There are a few nice, cleaner ways of doing stuff, but a lot of it is huge, heaping piles of pretty, shiny eye candy, with not a lot in the way of functionality to go with it. Still more stuff behind the scenes, with the assumption that most users don’t need it.
Which may, in fact, be true for some users, but for people with some experience or facility at actually using Windows, it’s like wading through rainbow cotton candy, which is not … terribly helpful.
Many other tasks to come, some of which may have to wait to the end of next month when we’ll be out again, including:
- Getting their photo libraries all set up again.
- Checking that their iTunes is all set up correctly, too.
- Replace the Symantic AV and firewall with something less intrusive and less expensive (currently 50 days left of the trial offer that came with the machine). Likely AVG Free for the AV, firewall TBD.
- Replace the MS Office they have on trial, too, most likely with OpenOffice.
And several other things that (a) I have scribbled on little pieces of paper, and (b) will make it easier to provide remote tech support. 🙂
We LOVE Dave!!!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂
I am running AVG free on one of my senior citizen computers and have been very happy with it.
MrsDoF would use Gmail if she could paste images into a message. Have not figured out how to do that yet.
I switched to Vista when I upgraded my machine because I was having trouble getting XP to load and recognize the drivers for my SATA drives.
The good news is that I get to run LotRO with DX10 graphics! Beeyootiful!
The bad news is that I can’t get Help files for old programs (the MS fix won’t work for me), my taskbar stopped autohiding (and Taskbar Activate performs unreliably), and, most distressing, Vista refuses to allow my microphone to work, either with the onboard sound or my SB card (I actually fixed it once, but then an unrelated Vista problem forced me to use the Repair function, which trashed the mic function, and nothing I’ve tried this time has worked, although it now admits I have a mic plugged in). Fortunately I bought a webcam some time back, and that formerly wasteful purchase is now invaluable, as its microphone is being properly detected and allowed to pick up sounds (so I can use voice chat in LotRO again!).
I, too, use AVG Free, and it seems to run fine under Vista. Comcast’s free firewall isn’t Vista-compatible, so I’m using Vista’s built-in firewall. No issues so far.
I will likely make use of the built-in firewall, good idea. The Ks do fairly low-risk Net stuff.