Grueling Friday

[altivo]

Normally Fridays are pretty good, and mostly relaxed. Not this time. Here we are in the two week hiatus between the end of school and the start of summer reading club. There should be nothing going on.

Except that the school system is running "summer school" now for third and fourth grades. What? Seems utterly ridiculous to me, and probably exists not as a real educational hand up but rather because parents wanted free babysitting. Or maybe jailers. We had two classes in the library today, and it was as if two zoos full of monkeys had been dumped out in there. The noise alone was unbearable. In past years we've had no class visits from June through mid-September. Now I guess we'll have them all through June.

When the dust began to settle I went back to network stuff. I just used this year's computer budget to buy five new machines. These are all destined for specific places, including the new director's office (hers is ready, easy because she had no existing files) and the head of circulation (who is also the general admin assistant.) Technically, she was supposed to get a new machine in the last round of replacements, almost three years ago now, but she resisted being moved, didn't want her files touched, and didn't get around to collecting them herself. She's running Windows 2000 and this time must be upgraded. So today being her day off, I thought I'd just transfer her files and swap the machine out.

I think I got it right. The actual files weren't that hard. They were all in "My Documents" and her configuration stuff was all in "Documents and Settings" as it should be. The pain was getting her gigantic collection of bookmarks from one machine to the other intact, and then getting them converted into Firefox from IE. Even that was easier than the other problem: moving five years' worth of e-mail from one machine to the other, even with the same version of Thunderbird on both.

There's a suggested procedure for that, which involves copying or archiving a directory tree and restoring it in the same arrangement on the other machine. Then you start up Thunderbird and it just accepts the old setup as if it had always been there.

The problem? Windows 7 has rearranged everything that used to be in "Documents and Settings." Now this of itself looks good on the surface, as it's more logical and much more similar to the UNIX way. The problem is that there are some weird links and aliases in the directory tree now (most likely to maintain compatibility with old software) that are difficult to negotiate. No matter what I tried, Thunderbird just couldn't see the profile and folders that were there.

Finally I downloaded Mozbackup, a utility created to deal with exactly this problem. I was doubtful, but it really did work. I used it on the Win 2000 machine to make a backup archive of the e-mail settings and files, storing the archive on the network. Then I ran it on the Win 7 machine to restore those settings to the new machine. Took a while, but seems to have worked well enough.

By the time that was confirmed, it was closing time. No time to swap her machine out. So I had to leave her a note, since she works tomorrow, telling her to use the new machine on my worktable for her e-mail at least. She can actually use it for everything if she chooses, but definitely for e-mail. Otherwise she'll end up with new messages stored on the old machine and I'll have to do the entire backup sequence again. Ewww.

Boy am I glad that hers is the only machine that needs this treatment. The remaining three are going to be erased and have Linux installed, so no dealing with Windows 7 is required.

Oh, and Gary had a performance in Wheeling, so he was gone when I got home and didn't get back until after 9. Dinner was very late, and I did barn stuff between getting home and when he arrived, as well as going shopping for salad stuff to use when making a huge salad for the AARF outing tomorrow (RPO day at the IllinoiS Railroad Museum.)

Comments

[schnee]

I used Mozbackup before to transfer my Firefox setting stuff from Urðr (my old computer) to Skuld (the new one). It worked well enough, although I was skeptical in the beginning, too. :)

[altivo]

It didn't seem necessary. In the past all I've had to do is copy the Profile directory over. But now even in a new installation, there appear to be two or three "Profiles" directories in different places in the directory tree for Mozilla. Once I got it working, two of them had the same profile, which suggests some kind of directory link to make a file look like it is in two places at once. I'm used to seeing this on UNIX type systems, but not Windows. If I copied a new profile in, it was in one place but not the other, and didn't work apparently.

[frith]

Was your noise level as bad as mine? At the meet-the-keeper gig, Rhino edition, the noise level emanating from the little pink apes chattering at the viewing area is so high that I can barely hear myself talk. I doubt they hear me either, even though the speakers are turned up to ten. But by 3 pm or so they get herded back aboard their buses and get shipped back to their cages from whence they escaped.

I wish I could deep-six the 'My Stuff' folders microsoft saddles their OS's with. 'My blank'. Twits. Who else would have personal folders my %^$# laptop? When you can't rename folders as it suits you they cease to be 'my folders'. Unless... the "my" refers to Microsoft. 9_9

[altivo]

I deep-sixed those folders years ago when I switched to Linux. I won't be switching back, either.

My guess is the noise levels were similar, at least if you were outdoors. Our building, like so many, is designed to look pretty but doesn't have good acoustical properties. A crowd of noisy kids echoes from one end to the other like a thunderstorm.

[moonhare]

The noise alone was unbearable.

It's only just begun! When the Summer Reading Program gets underway in a couple of weeks it's going to get quite loud here.

Are you doing the National program "Make a Splash at Your Local Library"? I was so excited to see that Henry Cole did the illustrating for the associated artwork. Cole's work is among my favorites!

...no dealing with Windows 7 is required.

I successfully avoided Vista (we had two pc's with Vista, and they never gave me any troubles), but our new laptops all have Windows 7. We'll be ghosting next week.

[altivo]

Fortunately I only have to keep Windows on some (not all) staff PCs, largely due to insistence of older staff members that they can't adjust to even tiny changes in the way they do things. (This is incredibly irritating but I've given up on arguing. They stubbornly use commercial Windows software that is 10 or more years old, unsupported, and a royal headache to keep running.)

The vast majority of our equipment is on Linux now. I'd have bought these machines with blank disk drives and put Windows on only where needed but Dell wouldn't sell them to me without Windows.

I avoid Summer Reading as if it were bubonic plague. I think the whole concept is wrong, at least as libraries implement it here. Our theme is "Scare up a good book." The people who plan this are redecorating the Reference Desk as a mad scientist's lab, and the assistants who handle the paperwork and prizes are dressing up in lab coats as "the mad scientist's assistants." Kid-appropriate horror films (such as Rocky & Bullwinkle and the Pottsylvania Creeper) will be shown.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

That's kind of odd, I'm used to the Thunderbird profiles being pretty consistent across platforms. The only folder that matters is usually the one with the string of random alphanumeric characters. Then there's the profiles.ini file that identifies the default. What I usually do is just start Thunderbird on a fresh install, track down the location of the new profile, then delete it, replacing it with the old profile and either editing the profile.ini file to default to the "old" profile, or just replace it with the old one as well. If Windows 7 manages to screw that process up, it's not even worth bothering with. The advantage of cross-platform apps is portability, and that should not be broken!

[altivo]

I note that Mozilla apps have been growing ever more bloated (and prone to more security issues) as time goes on. Feature bloat is what kills hardware and software both, but no one seems to get it.

This directory issue though appears to be at least partly Microsoft's fault. The same profile is visible in multiple places on the path, and I think there are hard links involved. It's nasty.

[deffox]

The aliases in Win7 required some getting used to for me too. I wasted some time trying to give myself access to a folder before realizing a subfolder wasn't actually stored there.

However, I never use the 'My Documents' folder. A work computer I used once hiccuped and recreated my profile deleting all my files. Since then 'My Documents' only has shortcuts to where the data is actually stored on different partitions.

I also store my Thunderbird emails on the RAID 1 D: drive.

[altivo]

I've seen that kind of hiccup back on Windows NT 4. They had some issue with certain processors, and after fighting with MS support over it for weeks they finally admitted as much to me. And told me that they weren't going to fix it. That was when I really began to despise Microsloth for their arrogance and stupidity.

Windows is designed to be easy for the compleat idiot. As is OSX, for that matter. Hence "My Documents." I can't tell you the number of people I've had to help after they "saved" a file without knowing WHERE they saved it.

The trouble is, for those of us who want an "expert" interface so we can streamline what we are doing, Windows no longer offers any real options. And that's why I quit using it.