 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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Finally I have a brand new Editor's PC. All the previous ones were hand-me-downs even if they were not particularly old at the time. The first one was a real IBM PC Portable, a "sewing machine" style construction. It was short-lived as it was for subeditors and I held that title for just one month. Editor David Jitts resigned and I took over his role for two-and-a-bit years. Amazingly, IBM Australia asked for the return of that donated/loan PC when they were selling 80386s - it is probably in a museum now.
The next PC was the dearest - a Wyse 80386/16 that cost the group about $7000 back in
1987-88. I am not sure if that included its 19-inch B&W monitor, but that monitor was a delight for laying out the pages of this magazine with Ventura Publisher. In the early 1990s, then-President Charles Wright arranged for HP to donate an 80486
Vectra and a decent ScanJet scanner for the magazine. I still use its 15-inch monitor even though it does not know anything about energy-saving green stars.
PC Update Producer Gary Taig had once been Production Editor under the editorship of Peter Smith, when I was Reviews Editor. At a later date, when Carol Daniels became Editor, I inherited Gary's old production machine by way of Major Keary, who was also Editor for a while. About four years ago it was given a new mother-board and turned into a 300 MHz Celeron. Its CD-ROM drive was "updated" with a used six-speeder and a 6 GB hard disk was also added.
The New PC
The new machine is a 1 GHz Pentium III and is a delight to use. I want to share some thoughts with those interested in the mechanics of migrating to a new PC. I had my personal data on my own ancient 1.5 GB hard disk and it was partitioned into drive letters D and G. It held only my data, so the drive letters did not matter.
Before packing up the old PC for handing over to the Bayside SIG, I took a screen dump of its desktop with the Ash Nallawalla Programs menu displayed. That will
remind me what programs I had previously installed, should I wish to reinstall them and I'm installing them as the need arises.
I had to ensure that the new machine's 20 GB hard disk was partitioned (using Partition Magic 5.0) efficiently so that my old drive could coexist. I created a 1 GB partition for storing CD images, as it is safer to make such an image before burning a CD. This machine does not have a BURN-proof CD burner. Puzzled? BURN stands for Buffer UnderRun Error - in simple terms, if your PC is doing something else while burning a CD, you end up with a new coaster.
On the old PC, the only data on the C drive that I backed up daily was my Outlook 2000 mail folder, IE Favourites, Cookies, and some Office fonts and templates. I use Ueritas Backup Exec Desktop Pro and recommend it for painless, automated backup.
On the new PC, I installed the backup program and having installed the new Office XP (2002), restored the data files to the C drive. I could not see my old e-mail in Outlook 2002 and my heart sank until I realised that Outlook 2002 keeps its files in the \Windows\Local Settings branch, not \Windows\Application Data, where the rest of Office lives.
The big drive also enabled me to back up my own, smaller drive. It is a good idea to back up a hard disk to another physical disk because a failure of the drive mechanism will render useless all partitions that live on the original disk. I schedule various backups on different days and times so that it is not a drawn-out, annoying delay all on one day. I had forgotten to save my old Rules for Outlook and Outlook Express but they included rules for ancient virus-laden
files and I had the chance to redefine some of those rules. I labelled the DVD drive as drive letter V and the CD writer as drive W. The hard drive is on a removable tray, as used by some SIGs,
so if I happen to slide in a new drive, I won't need to change those drive letters as they are sufficiently high.
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Putting IT Back
The IT Fund for Kids 2001 "Putting IT Back" campaign is an initiative that rallies the IT industry together to raise funds to help Australia's children in need. Throughout October, employees of the IT community are encouraged to contribute a day's pay (or nominated amount) to the fund. For further information and to sign up, please visit
http://www.itfundforkids.com or contact Penny Reading from the Starlight Children's Foundation on (02) 8425 5908, or e-mail
preading@starlight.org.au.
Supported by the industry association, the AIIA, the goal of the 2001 campaign is to improve on the $502,000 raised by the 43 participating companies last year. The proceeds from this year's campaign will be used by the Starlight Children's Foundation for its wish-granting program along with the development of a virtual private network for seriously ill children, whilst Giant Steps will use the funds to implement a "Life Skills" program for children with autism.
Reprinted from the October 2001 issue of PC Update,
the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
