The joy of rebuilding...

... laptops, that is! ;-) I've spent the last couple of days moving my stuff from one laptop to another, something I seem to do quite regularly, and have got it down to a fine art now. Actually, the *transferring* is pretty straightforward; I backup the \Documents and Settings\username directory on the old laptop, add my domain account to the new laptop, restore the backup on top of it while logged on as a different local administrator on the new laptop, making sure to overwrite every file, and that's pretty much that. No, the time-consuming part is installing all of the applications (particularly Visual Studio .NET 2003 - scratch a couple of hours to install *that* puppy). Still, all done now.

One thing I really love about most well-behaved Windows applications (and which seems to characterises all those I use) is the way they store user-specific configuration in the XP user profile, so that I can restore that user profile on a new laptop (with settings related to apps that aren't installed on that laptop) and the new system doesn't crash (well, why should it?); yet as soon as I install the apps, they're immediately configured with my settings from the old laptop. That is just what I would want, and I'm sure it wasn't always as easy as that.

So, I have a nice and nippy new environment, in that virgin XP-starts-up-in-a-gladsome-twinkling-of-an-eye state. I only have the apps I currently use installed (and I've been polite enough to remove the ones I'd installed from the old laptop, so its new owner doesn't have to) and it's configured *just so*; inevitably I will have forgotten to transfer some files that weren't in the \Documents and Settings\username directory on the old laptop (I usually forget *something*). But it rarely matters; once it's gone, it's gone. Once I've added the new user's domain account to the old laptop, I'll log in as local administrator, remove *my* domain user, delete my \Documents and Settings\username directory, and that's that. Ideally, the new user would wipe the hard drive and reinstall from scratch (or restore a pre-built image) but I don't think this particular user will be in the market for that.

Now, if only my new laptop were pink... ;-)

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