Progress report

Things aren’t quite as bad as I thought last night.  I have, for instance, got Agent working, by the simple brute force expedient of running it in Win XP compatibility mode.  Sometimes the old ways are the best – literally, in this case.

However, I also ran off a list of all the installed software under the Vista regime.  This is going to take weeks to get everything back up and running.  Having made myself despondent I thought a bit of hardware hacking might help.  It’s always therapeutic to pull the insides out of a PC and put them back together again – as long as it works afterwards.

Needless to say, in this case it didn’t.  I’d found an extra SATA power adaptor and data cable, so went for the three drive setup.  This involved moving the current system drive to another SATA port – when the right-angle cable necessary to fit under the extended graphics card broke, leaving part embedded in the motherboard connector.  One fine pair of pliers later, the offending plastic was removed, and I was able to get all three SATA connections up and running.

Reboot – and only two drives showing.  The original data drive was AWOL: this was not what I expected, since it was the one cable I hadn’t touched, so it’s back inside the case again and check all the connections.  Turns out that the power lead to the drive had become adrift, so everything gets hammered back in as usual (which is possibly why the SATA connector above broke in the first place…), switch things back on and hey presto, three drives. 

Next question – which Samsung is the data drive and which is the old system drive in the BIOS?  Trial and error (emphasis on the latter) eventually got the drives in the right order, and I now have a Windows 7 workstation which boots up, complete with operational software.  Well, some of it’s operational, which is where we started.

Wish I hadn’t started

After all the hype, it seemed reasonable to try an update to Windows 7 on my main workstation.

I think my first mistake was to try to to this as a new install, rather than an update.  On second thoughts, perhaps the mistake was in the decision to upgrade in the first place.

We have any number of  PCs at work with complex configurations and obscure software, half of which is either totally obsolete or tied to hardware that probably belongs in a museum.  Frankly, they’re easy compared to this home monstrosity.  Servers running tightly optimised programs?  No problem.  This box?  Well, it has so many old and undocumented applications that I can’t track down sources for that there’s no way I can realistically hope to reproduce it in a new build.

So I took a decision to drop all the old stuff, and just concentrate on a core group of applications – the usual things, browsers, mail, usenet.

Problem number 1 – all my passwords and install keys are on the system drive that I’m replacing, and so far I haven’t been able to get three SATA drives running on the PC.  It will come with time, but to start with I need the new Win7 drive, plus my main data drive.  Why I didn’t store the passwords on the data drive is a mystery that will probably never be solved.

OK, several drive swaps later we have most of the info.  On to loading the applications, starting with Firefox: do you think I can find half the add-ons that I’m used to?  No, and to get details I have to re-attach the old system drive – again.

Even the Outlook install was difficult, mainly because of the number of external email accounts that I like to monitor directly.  I’ve forgotten most of the server names needed for IMAP and SMTP connections.  Thankfully, IE does work out of the box and I was able to research the necessary information.  Where would we be without the internet?  Oh, we wouldn’t have email…

Forte Agent – OK, it installs, and I even got the server account sorted (eventually); but on restarting the app it just hangs.   I don’t have the strength to fix this.

On reflection, the easiest components are still the Microsoft ones.  The company may come in for a lot of stick, but when things work, they work well: witness this, Windows Live Writer set up and blogging in no time at all.   Now if only Steve Ballmer would invest in buying a few more companies – like Forte.