[X4U] Good Reading

[Stroller]

On Jul 18, 2005, at 10:04 pm, Michael Winter wrote:
> On Jul 18, 2005, at 3:44 PM, Stroller wrote:
>
>> About half of my work is fixing PCs for home users - the other half 
>> being fixing them for small businesses. What you're not accounting 
>> for is that the average home user simply isn't comfortable 
>> reinstalling Windows - many don't even know how to back up their 
>> photos to CD!
>
> As much as I don't want to believe that, I do. It's a sad state of 
> affairs.

I meant to make the car ownership analogy during my previous post, in 
that the typical Mac user is like someone who buys a car with a 100,000 
mile service interval - it doesn't matter if he doesn't know how to 
change the oil, as servicing is so infrequent. I've had Mac users pay 
me to install Panther for them, incidentally, and more than one (I am 
sure) who hasn't realised that fitting more memory involves a 
*physical* upgrade.

PC users are like the majority of car owners - they don't check the oil 
in their old bangers often enough, but take their car to a mechanic for 
servicing or when it breaks. Others simply roll their sleeves up & 
enjoy setting the clearances on the valves.

>> Installing Windows XP can easily take a couple of hours, especially 
>> on systems a year or two old - many PCs are _still_ sold with 256meg 
>> or less of RAM - and that's not counting Office, Service Pack 2, 
>> internet setup, accounts for the kids &c &c.
>
> But all of that (except probably SP2) would have to be done with a new 
> PC too, wouldn't it?

Hmmmn... Office is often but not always preinstalled on PCs in the UK, 
but it's the Windows install that's the scary thing. Most folks aren't 
too intimidated by the thought of installing one or two programs, but a 
new PC gives people the feeling that they're "starting afresh" and 
getting rid of "that old thing that gave us so much trouble".

Installing Windows tends to be more problematic than installing OS X 
because you may well have a modem, sound- or video-card in your machine 
for which there are no drivers on the Windows CD. It's easy for me to 
sort that out now, but some of the the nastier hardware I've found in 
Windows 98 machines would take literally hours to find the drivers for.

>> If I can take the computer home & leave it running - I back-up the 
>> whole hard-drive and install any additional software in addition to 
>> the above -
>
> And what I couldn't believe is that the first person in the article 
> (with a Ph.D. in compsci) didn't have a clean image backed up 
> somewhere he could restore instead of buying a whole new computer. 
> Which he's going to have to do again in 6 months unless he's going to 
> be running a different OS or doing things different than he has been.

Actually, I never use a image for installations as I consider it 
slightly bad practice - I believe that there's a long unique ID (called 
the SID??) which is generated at install time and which can cause 
problems if it is allocated to multiple machines on the network. In any 
case, for most users it's going to be just as quick to do a format & 
install & slap the applications back on again - a disk image will take 
just as long to prepare & test as doing it again from scratch the next 
time, and the image may well be out of date by then in any case.

The principal advantage, as I see it, of replacing the machine is that 
you can hang on to the old one for as long as you like to pull your 
data off it. I've had phonecalls from people who have reinstalled only 
to realise afterwards that all their family photos were on the machine 
and I know from old experience how easy it is to back up everything 
except your Outlook Express data (which isn't stored in My Documents 
but somewhere in C:\Windows\User 
Data\Stroller\Microsoft\Identities\{2362173672163471286}\).

When I do a backup of the whole system, I mean that I do it before I do 
the reinstall to cover my arse from such blunders. By the stage I'm 
doing a reinstall it's because the software / o/s won't be reparable 
within an hour or two, anyway, so I boot to a Linux CD & copy every 
file on the C: drive to a USB disk. I can then burn it onto DVD and be 
sure the customer isn't missing any of their personal files, documents 
or whatever. I've never had a customer come back and tell me that I've 
lost a really important document from a program which keeps its files 
in C:/Program Files/Important/Financial/Data but I don't intend to 
start anytime soon, either!!

I think in the long term data is going to become something we & our 
usage of technology mature towards - I'd imagine that in a decade few 
adults in their 20s or 30s would hesitate a moment in formatting their 
hard-drive, secure in the knowledge that it work perfectly and all 
their data is backed-up on their TV's hard-drive. I'd imagine that by 
that time most teenagers will keep all their data synced to their 
iPods, and that tales of essays or albums lost to hard-drive failure 
will be considered archaic.

Stroller.