Working with Windows, or, Why I Use Macs

Tuesday, July 10^th, 2007 » Software, Windows

I have just spent the past 28 hours or so (minus seven hours for sleep and two hours for errands) 19 hours imaging, formatting, reinstalling, and restoring a Windows XP-based Dell for my sister, and yet again I remember the oh-so-many reasons why I’m a Mac person.

I arrived at my sister’s place here in Flint at about 8 PM last night, and within an hour I had already started my long and arduous process with the ultimate goal of having a fresh computer with that “brand-new” feeling, speed, and responsiveness. The first task was to install Norton Ghost, my personal favorite drive imaging application for any platform; while I find there are many useful Mac applications for imaging, I have yet to find one I like as well as Ghost. With Ghost installed, I performed the one-click magical action that is Clone.

About an hour and a half later, I had a complete image of the system backed up on an external drive. I just popped in the Unattended Windows XP SP2 install disc I created last summer, set it, and [forget] it. Half an hour later I had a fresh install Windows XP Pro. The easiest work was done.

At around two in the morning, I had to reinstall Windows again due to a system crash which, to my geeky pleasure, produced the glorified BSOD and elicited a laugh from myself. I decided to call it a night at a little after 3, once the system was back in a operable state.

From the time I woke up (10:30) to just about an hour ago, I have been slowly-but-surely restoring some of the backed-up files to the “new” computer. It took about 6 hours to restore the My Documents folder, Outlook and Outlook Express email settings, and some other files, mostly due to the fact that my sister is blessed(?) with the photography gene and has roughly 20-some gibibytes of pictures on her computer. But the worst part was waiting for the files to copy out of the Ghost image. I don’t quite understand why restoring those files from the image takes three times as long as it did to create the image in the first place.

With the Dell ready to rock-and-roll, I turned my attention to their other computer: a 1999 Gateway, running Windows 98SE. The goal was to copy another five gibibytes or so of older photos onto the external drive, and then onto the Dell. After waiting eight minutes and 14 seconds for it to boot up, I slowly (four restarts later) discovered that Maxtor doesn’t have Win98SE drivers for the drive model we have. My solution was to download drivers for my SanDisk flash drive, which also made me have to download WinZip. After restarting yet again, I finally had a means to transport the pictures to the Dell.

Four hours later, I was done transferring the pictures, and hoping that I’ll never have to use Windows 98 again. Using that Gateway was the most painful computing experience I’ve ever had, but it’s over. A full day of work was required to complete this task, and I’m damn glad it’s done.

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