As it is I reloaded all the data from an external hard drive (always keep a copy!) while re-installing software from scratch. The anti-virus was first, then Firefox, Chrome, Spotify, Last.FM, iTunes and PhotoFiltre to download. MS Office was next, which involved downloading and some calls to the MS customer support number to get itactivated. PaintShop Pro and Photoshop Elements were next and surprisingly that was no problem – I have always found Adobe to be fussy about licence keys .

It was all a bit slow, but then thre was a lot of data transfer going on, followed by iTunes and Windows Media Player searching for podcasts and music files respectively and updating their libraries. Actually the WMP library update took forever.

Finally I set up email accounts on Outlook and was quite pleased to find not nearly as much spam as I was expecting.

I’ve got the printer drivers set up but still need to install the software from the Flip and Sony Reader and then whatever other bits and pieces I can think of. For old times’ sake I shall reinstall some of the iRiver software since the trusty old HP120 does still work.

I supppose that now everything is up and running again I should think about actually doing some work before I get tempted to install Age of Empires and Rise of Nations. I’m looking forward to the possibilities of photo editing with two monitors at my disposal.

Sounded pretty neat, and then a few hours later I find that Microsoft are already doing it.   It suddenly makes the rest of the book a whole lot more plausible.

As a rule I don’t like to play with such things, especially on computers where I don’t know whether there is a recovery disk and that don’t belong to me.  The last time I did this sort of low-level stuff it was a real chore, and probably all done in DOS so I approached it with a fair bit of trepidation.

On the recommendation of a work colleague I tried something called Easus Partition Master – a free download from the web. It worked a treat.  Very easy to operate, all done within Windows, not too slow, and didn’t screw anything up, which was a relief.

I shrunk the D: partition to about 10GB, which is more than enough for this particular person, and expanded C: to use the rest of the space.

I might now push my luck and look for a free registry cleaning tool.  Jayne’s attempts to make space have resulted in a few registry entries referring to non-existent files and a couple of very annoying error messages every time the computer is started.  It all works OK, but having the same couple of warnings every session is going to get boring very quickly.  I had a quick look with REGEDIT but soon gave up on that.

Any recommendations?

Not sure about the new Firefox yet.  You can install themes, like with Chrome, and it is supposed to be faster.  Maybe it is but no so that I would notice.  At the moment I think Chrome is noticeably faster, but I’m still sticking with Firefox for the add-ons.

I think I might have to see if I have an XP disc for that computer and go for the nuclear option with a clean install.

One thing though: passwords.  I do believe that some people are stupid enough to give a newcomer their username and password, even if the have access to the toppest of top secrets, but I do not believe that such a place would have got accreditation for their computer system to hold such secrets in the first place if it allowed simple passwords like “hastings”.  No numbers.  No punctuation.  No mix of upper and lower case…  whoever is in charge of that network needs to be sacked.   And whoever it was in CESG who signed the accrediation should follow them!

Only problem is that it has done things to Firefox that I can’t undo.The software installed a toolbar on Firefox, which is fine: I can hide that and may want to use it someday if I need to PDF a web page.  I am more worried by the other changes.

Search Engines
The install added Yahoo to the list of search engines in Firefox. No problem there – an extra search engine does no harm even if I am unlikely to use it.  What is a problem is that it now defaults to Yahoo and I can’t work out/remember how to change the default back to what I want (wikipedia usually).  It is so long since I originally set up FF I have probably forgotten more about it than I currently know.

Saving tabs
Beofre this install, when I closed Firefox down I was asked it I wanted to just quit or to save the tabs and quit.  About half the time it suited me to save the tabs so that the next time I opend it up all the same tabs would be open.  Very handy if you are in the middle of a few things.

Now I do not get the option, and I can’t find out how to get it back.

It is possible, of course, that this is not all down to installing a new program.  It could have been an update of Firefox: there seems to be a new update of it at least once a week lately.  I am currently on version 3.0.10 and if anybody has any suggestions I’ll be glad to hear them!

In theory, you should refresh your data archives every few years or so, moving it onto newer media and newer media formats, and converting it to different file formats if necessary.  But that costs in administration and in the actual execution.  If you never have cause to recall any of that data it is money down the drain so you have to decide whether to just keep the physical media refreshed.

You could then incur some serious cost in restoring any data – either getting it converted into readable formats or re-creating your 20-year-old server environment to load it onto.  But if you only have to do that rarely it could cost you less.

And even if you reach that point you might decide not to bother.  You might find it cheaper to recreate the files from scratch in some cases.

Admittedly the whole topic of data storage and archives is terminally dull, but that does not make it unimportant and many people don’t appreciate the scale of the problem and the inherent irony – that we could find a lost 100-year-old manuscript and be able to read it perfectly but a 25-year-old backup would be hugely impractical to read.

For a start there is the risk of physical degradation of the media.  If that was OK you would still have to find a compatible media reader: not everybody still has 8-inch floppy drives, QIC tape decks or the giant decks for reading tape reels.

Depending on the nature of the data you could then have to find the original application, and possibly the exact right version of it.  (Do you still have the original install disks or tapes for 25-year-old software?)    As that isn’t bad enough, you might have to create the operating system to load that application onto, and that means either finding some old hardware of the right type or software to emulate it on a virtual machine.

So, generally a good thing to have a universal emulator.  Even better if it includes Sinclair Spectrum emulation

Anyway, it took me forever to get everything copied across to the new computer.  Being able to have the old and new computers running together, and connected through the LAN should have made it straightforward, but it still dragged on – all those gigabytes of photos and music to move, all those settings for three different browsers and e-mail, all those obscure applications to re-install.

I like to know that the applications I use are here under my desk and under my control and would feel uneasy relying on applications on the Internet and even less easy if all my files were on servers all over the world, but it wouldn’t half make migrating to a new computer easy!   I am seriously thinking about the halfway house measure of getting a networked 1TB hard drive and keeping everything on there so that in future I can just plug into that from a new PC.

It does not help that so much of the setting up now relies on an Internet connection whether it is to download patches or programs or just to register them after installation – or even just to look up help on what to do.   Yesterday I was planning to do the last bits of setting up, but in the afternoon somebody who probably got their driving licence from a cornflakes packet managed to take out broadband (and cable TV) for half of Broadfield by crashing a car into one of Virgin Media’s roadside boxes and completely flattening it.

Fair play to Virgin Media, they did have it all up and running by the next morning.  Their engineers were still out there working on restoring a service at two in the morning, but it was a bit personally frustrating.

Looking on the bright side…  in a fit of optimism I installed iHPtools on the new computer and it worked.  For some reason it would not work on the old XP machine but is fine under Vista, so now I can go back to using that to set up playlists on the trusty old iRiver.

The thing he was really bothered about was everything being big. For some reason the screen was in VGA mode, which was easily sorted, but with a better resolution I could see what was really wrong – all sorts of messages about viruses.  Windows Security Centre was saying that the machine was unprotected and an information bubble was saying that somebody was currently stealing all his personal details but the anti-virus software was out-of-date and needed to be registered to fix it.

Total codswallop!

I knew for a fact that I installed Grisoft’s AVG anti-virus software, so the machine is protected. I had never heard of the software Antivirus 2009 but it sounded dodgy to me.  I opened up the program from the system tray and then killed it with Task Manager and straight away Windows Security Centre said that the computer was protected after all.  I did a bit of research on my computer (almost guaranteed to work because I never let anybody else get their hands on it) and this AV2009 turns out to be a nasty bit of malware, usually installed from a dodgy pop-up on websites.

The way Chas’s PC was behaving I was not going to have much luck downloading spyware removal software, so I had to go in and delete files, unregister DLLs, remove registry entries, and generally wave goodbye to an hour of my evening.  It all looks OK now, or as good as a three- or four-year-old computer can look, but I’m currently feeling distinctly uncharitable towards rogue software authors and sorely tempted to install Linux up there.