Yeah, got that more or less wrapped up yesterday.
After a couple of evenings spent getting the vintage PC back into pretty-much-working mode, and one spent helping my father pick out a brand-new one (a Dell, with a fourth-generation Core i3, enough RAM and disk space to last a good long time, and Windows 7 pre-installed), yesterday was turn-on-the-new-PC day.
I'd already copied all the files from the old PC onto an external hard drive using Linux, but having a Windows-format backup seemed a good idea. I'd already tried using the backup "utility" that was bundled with XP, and discovered that, as had been the case back in the MS-DOS 3.2 days, Microsoft has never learned to write a backup program.
If memory serves, MS-DOS 3.2's backup program worked fine to dump my files... but MS-DOS 3.3's restore program didn't understand the legacy format. Which made the whole exercise rather less than useful.
Last week, when I backed up the files using Linux, I hit a patch of bad sectors. The same patch, three times in the process... so I assume it was some kind of NTFS metadata.
When I tried to use Windows backup, it aborted almost immediately with a message that amounted to "It didn't work." There was also a text file with a page of boilerplate and "It didn't work." Nothing in any way informative.
Well, yesterday morning I installed AOMEI Backupper, started a system backup, and took the dog for a walk. On my return, I found an error message: "There's a bad sector on this disk, so I can't back up anything."
C'mon, guys! I've seen this elsewhere in the Windows world, all too many times. The old "Abort, Retry, Ignore?" thing has gotten lost, and any error results in the whole operation being unceremoniously terminated.
Well, at least Backupper could do a file backup of the "Documents and Settings" area.
Then! Unplug the old machine, plug in the new one, and see what's on it.
Windows 7 Pro comes up. Good! But...
I'd left the old mouse connected, via a USB hub. I'm reminded that Windows doesn't do class drivers worth anything: it spent a loooong time looking for the device drivers for the hub and the mouse, and meanwhile the mouse wasn't working. I fetched the mouse that came with the new box and plugged in into a front-panel port. Windows looked for the device driver, and found it before too long. Moving the mouse to a different port resulted in yet another loading-device-driver incident. Guys? This is insane. Hub class drivers and HID class drivers: look them up. See how Linux has handled them since before there was Windows 98. Eventually, the old mouse on the hub started working too.
McCrappee complained that it wasn't enabled, and then enabled itself. Argh! But at least uninstalling it worked... slowly. Then: install Panda, enable the firewall, reboot, see that the hundred-and-one system updates are gonna take a while, run off to Fry's for a cheap 16GB thumb drive to hold a system recovery image, get back, wait for the last dozen system updates to install and the system to reboot, install the latest Thunderfox and Firebird, create user accounts, reboot (installing another dozen system updates), find the latest (Win7-compatible) software bundle for the printer, try to install that, have it abort right near the end but automatically find a solution (which will involve a reboot), manually invoke Windows Update to drag in yet anotherer set of updates, do the reboot, install the printer software successfully this time....
Then generate the emergency restore image onto the thumb drive, then switch to the family account, plug in the external hard drive, and commence copying the user data over from the backup I'd done using Linux.
That at least went smoothly. Win 7 even helpfully recognized things whose canonical locations had moved, and offered to put them in the new places, merge directories, and otherwise Do What I Meant.
Then, the test! Launch brand-new Firefox... and the bookmarks are all there! Launch brand-new Thunderbird... and it opens the inbox! So all's good to go on the web & mail fronts.
Install the latest OpenOffice, declare it Sufficient Unto the Day, and head home to dinner (and a worried menagerie).
Question of the day: why does turning on pre-installed Windows 7 take longer than installing Linux on a blank machine?
I'll still need to help with installing other software (some flavor of Photoshop Jr., MS Office (because Work), Acrobelfry, and probably also the GIMP, and Inkscape, and other useful things).
Eventually, I guess I'd better set them up with a 2.5"-format external hard drive (less likely to cook itself to death than the 3.5" form factor) and some sort of automated incremental backup, so there'll always be two copies of all the important documents and family photos. Maybe even some sort of cloud-based backup?
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