May 09 2008
Preparing the New PC
Two of my network cables arrived the other day. They’re of the three-foot variety, which is a little too short. I think I should have grabbed six-footers instead, but they will work nonetheless. The run isn’t all that long anyway. It’s just less cabling hanging down behind the desk I suppose.
Anyway, I’ve been transferring files from one to the other all night. I was doing that for three or four hours last night and am finishing up what’s left. It wasn’t too difficult. Outlook Express was surprisingly easy to transfer over. Microsoft had terrific instructions on their support site. In the past, I used instructions made by an Outlook Express guru, but his site doesn’t seem to be that easy to find or navigate through anymore.
The biggest hurdle I’ve faced had to deal with IP addresses. When I plugged the new machine into the network, I got an error message. Two PCs were fighting over the same IP. I forgot that I don’t have them using DHCP because I needed to give the machines static IPs for port forwarding on my router. So I had to check out what IPs the others were using and give the new PC an IP of its own. It wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t a problem I was expecting.
After getting all of that sorted out, I updated Windows. 38 Critical Updates were found on Microsoft’s Windows Update site. Wow. I think Dell needs to get these updates into their installation discs because that’s a lot of updates. And I passed on getting Service Pack 3 (SP3). I’ve heard a lot of complaints, so I’m staying away from it. Every time there’s a service pack released, Windows users complain of problems.
One other problem I didn’t think I was going to run into was Windows Messenger. It pops up when you open Outlook Express. I couldn’t get Messenger to stop popping up when I open OE. I unchecked every logical option within OE and Messenger and still couldn’t get it to stop popping up. So I did the natural thing: I edited the registry. This isn’t something I enjoy doing because I know bad things can happen if you screw up. But I followed instructions found on PC Hell and Microsoft’s support site to create a DWORD value that would stop Messenger. It worked like a charm. I no longer have to worry about that annoying little program anymore.
Right now, I’m just installing a few programs that I need… 7Zip, FileZilla, Winamp, Notepad++, etc. I should be done with that pretty soon and will be able to put the old Dell away in a box. It’ll be nice to get this old CRT monitor off my desk. That bowing in my desk is annoying as hell.
SP3 isn’t that bad, but it’s not really needed for a gaming machine that’s already protected by a router.
But everybody uses Messenger… 😛
“Set Program Access and Defaults” in the start menu should have taken care of that, no need to mess with the registry.
Maybe that’s what I used on the old machine; I didn’t see any registry edits on the old one. Regardless, I’m happy with the results. 🙂
I use Trillian anyway. It’s handy to have all of my IM stuff in one program.
One new computer? Feh! I have to build and (remote) deploy two new ones in the next two weeks. They are both Shuttle boxes- a normal one, and a KPC to run linux on.