(Note: this occurrence is not altogether a bad thing. I'll have a new, larger HDD, which is good. Better, it does allow for cleaning up my installation by not installing stuff I'm not using. But it's still a pain in the patootie.)
These kind of posts also provide an opportunity to talk about what I use on my PC.
STUFF FOR THE IT DEPARTMENT TO REINSTALL/REIMAGE
– MS Office 2010 [our current standard], along with Visio 2003 and Project 2010
– MS Communicator 2007 R2
– Cisco IP Communicator
– The current iPass/VPN standard
– TrueCrypt
– Paperless Printer driver
STUFF FOR ME TO REINSTALL FIRST THING
– Chrome (this may be installed with the image, since it's now a secondary standard in the company)
– LastPass (password management FTW!)
– XMarks (bookmark sync FTW!)
– Google Talk (hopefully I can still download the client-based version, which I find cleaner, faster, less annoying, and more useful than the in-browser Hangout tools)
– DropBox
– Filezilla (FTP client)
– Hack to put "Recent Items" in Favorites for Win7
– Restore all documents from external HD backup.
STUFF FOR ME TO REINSTALL AT MY EARLIEST CONVENIENCE
– Techsmith SnagIt 11 (screen capture and graphic editor)
– Flickr.Net screen saver
– Google Drive (download sync)
– WebEx (so I don't end up spending several minutes doing so when trying to hop onto my next session.)
– BestSync 2012 (easy backup to external HD)
– MFC-9840CDW LAN printer drivers (for at home)
– CCleaner
– YWriter 5 (novel writing editor)
– MessageExport plug-in for Outlook.
– Games: Pirate 101; Torchlight 2 (never played at the office, of course, but while traveling on business)
CHROME EXTENSIONS
(I think Chrome's sync will deal with this, but in case …)
AdBlock
Add to Amazon
Bit.ly
Classic Retweet
Copy Without Formatting
Create Link
Favorite Posts of Google+
Feedly (RSS reader)
FlashBlock
Goo.gl URL Shortener
Google Translate
MightText (SMS from my PC FTW!)
New Tabs Always Last
Search by Image
Share Extensions
Universal Search & IE8 Accelerators (set up for Google, Google Images, Amazon, Wikipedia, Wikiquote, WIST, Bible Gateway, Dictionary, IMDB, YouTube)
Weather Now
[LastPass and Xmarks will be loaded with those products]
#Ninite is your friend 🙂
After you sign into Chrome open the extensions settings and hit the force sync at the top right to speed it up.
Xmarks ftw indeed! Don't forget to turn off Chrome bookmark sync first.
I never have liked gtalk standalone. Chrome extension has been superior for a long time imo.
What does xmarks provide over Chrome's bookmark sync? As someone who's never heard of the former…
Sync with Firefox and IE. Used to be called Foxmarks. Honestly it's a bit neglected, but still handy. Lastpass acquired them a year or so ago saving the service from going out of business.
Why aren't they just cloning your hard drive onto the new one? With software like Acronis it should automatically resize the partition to use up all the new space.
+Doug Dunfee I find the GTalk standalone more responsive, less intrusive, and it creates a fantastic "the network is down/up" icon in the taskbar.
Assuming the Chrome sync brings in settings, that should take care of the Chrome bookmark sync. But I'll confirm it.
Re Xmarks: what +Doug Dunfee said. Since I still have to work in a world where I use IE (not, at present, Firefox, but it's nice to keep my options open), I like having it. If I could just use Chrome I'd probably go with the simpler Chrome sync option.
Apparently, +Les Jenkins, that's not their SOP. The plan is to put my existing drive into a loaner duplicate, install the new drive (larger and solid-state) into my machine, do all the standard imaging, then hand it off to me. That way, I guess, I have a clean current image.
+Doug Dunfee Took a quick look at Ninite — doesn't look like it covers enough of what I need to do with my work laptop to make it worth it — though for my home laptop, next time out, I'll have to remember it …
My workplace doesn't allow tools like Acronis either. It interferes with corporate tools and doesn't do a clean clone. Its too damn good at what it does copying over system IDs that shouldn't be.
http://cheezburger.com/4519394048
+Jon Weber could you elaborate on what problem Acronis causes? We've been using it for disk cloning whenever someone needs to upsize their HD without any issues whatsoever. Near as I can tell, it does a bit by bit copy and resizes the partition and that's it. Doesn't break trust with the DC (like Windows Restore does) or interfere with anything that I can see.
I'm not the expert, just relaying what the folks at work tell me. Something about system IDs being copied because of the bit by bit transfer. For us this is a bad thing because it looks like you have two computers with the same name on the network. Also all new computers are required to have a new computer name so that enterprise tools work properly. From what I hear those system IDs get copied over and are a pain to work around with sccm and other enterprise tools.
If it's a new computer then, yes, I can see where that would be a problem, but for simply upgrading to a bigger hard drive it shouldn't be an issue. It's the same computer, just a bigger drive. You'd want all the system IDs to be the same.
Ah yes, that do be true.