So last week the IT guys told me I'd be getting a new machine, and I'd need to surrender my old one when they gave me the new one. Well, that doesn't work. Especially when you're in the middle of development of projects. So after cutting through all the red tape, I was able to keep my 'old' box for a few weeks. I'm going to throw down some of my thoughts about transitioning to a new machine, and some things to think about that will help you.

Don't just toss your old machine out. Do the project in parallel. Had I turned in my machine when they simply dropped a new one off at my desk, I would have been "down tools" (an expression my Dad uses) for about two days.  Not to mention if my projects needed something, my new box would not have been setup correctly to respond to emergencies. So my old laptop was set aside, and kept running, it was great to be able to refer to it for settings, and other issues too.

There are two things really to have to do in migrating to a new computer, install your software and transfer your data. Both may seem really simple, but there are a lot of 'gotchas' to worry about. I'll address both items below in the following two sections.

Installing Software.

Think of your new computer as a brand new house. You don't have a pile of junk mail sitting on the table, hell, there's not even furniture in the place. So don't just move everything in right away, wouldn't a nice book case be better than the cinder blocks and 2x4's? Did you really ever use the Tiki bar that someone gave you years ago? The first thing I did was made a list of all the software I had installed on the 'old' box, and started trimming out things I hadn't used in 6 months or more. There are a few ways to accomplish this, I intially found a VBScript I ran to outoput a list of all the installed software, but then found this great free utility: MyUninstaller. It's an exe that run, nothing to install even. It will list every single item that is installed on your computer. You can even export the list to a text file, and bring it into excel, and do your evaluations there! Be realistic, there are of course programs that you have to install, but in reality, less is more. Don't try to get by with no Word processor, or no music software, but is that one time use utility worth installing? MyUninstaller works way faster than the Windows one, and provides a ton more information in an easy to read and use format.

Don't forget about utilities you use that are plain executables that don't have an install/uninstall associated with them. A good way to keep track of these is to create a 'tools' folder and dump all your stuff in there. I have a ruler tool, the MyUninstaller, and some utilities I've written to do stuff I need to do for my job. Just don't forget about these guys, as it could take a while to find them.

Once you're done installing all of your software, update update update. Get on Windows Update and start the service pack installations. You may find that you have to do this several times, or even before all of your software is installed, but now's the time to get it ALL on there.

Moving Data.

Hopefully, if you're organized, your data is all in once place. It's probably in your my documents folder. But there are a lot of other things to remember to grab while you're copying those files to your new environment.

1. Your Desktop - There's probably stuff sitting on your desktop that you'll want to move. If you keep shortcuts there, as long as your new programs are installed to the exact same locations, they should work. Files, and other stuff can be found in the Drive:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop
2. Outlook PST Files - Do a local hard drive search for *.pst and make sure you copy any of the PST files you may want on your new machine. Also setting up email on your new machine is easily facilitated by keeping your old box up, so you can get the settings off of it.
3. Bookmarks/Favorites -Your bookmarks are something that make you productive (hopefully) make sure you go to the Drive:\Documents and Settings\User\Favorites folder and copy these to your new machine in the samme location, now is a good time to go through and clean house on those as well.
4. Misc - Critically think about other things that may be in other places that are important to you. Again, this is why you should run both systems parallel for a few weeks before committing to the new one.

Transition.

Once the new system is setup, and you're 'confident' that you're ready to be on the new system, turn the old one off. Keep the old system handy for a week or two, and if you have the means, backup the old system entirely.

Apple usually makes this stuff simple. The 1.1.2 Firmware has been out since yesterday, and iTunes STILL does not know about the new firmware release. I found a link on engadet where you can download the actual firmware. After downloading the 160MB file, and sticking it on my desktop, you'd think a simple double click would start the update.... nope. Double clicking the file opens iTunes, but then it sits there and does nothing. Dang it. Here's how to get that file working... <shift> <click> the "Restore" button in iTunes, it will give you a file dialogue to choose a file, then simply locate the file and click OK.

NOTE: Doing the update this way required me to restore my iPhone to factory default settings during the upgrade, when I chose to restore from my last backup, it applied the 1.1.2 firmware, and then restored my phone from said backup. It took quite a while and I am now syncing all my songs and movies back to the device, doing the update this way, will RESET your phone to factory settings. But as long as you have a recent backup, it should not matter.

My good friend, Scott (a Type I diabetic) is trying to raise $50,000 this year to fight diabetes. Now that he's working for Microsoft, he has all kinds of cool contacts, like people that will help him rent out Vancouver's Cinetopia and let a bunch of geeks come play Halo 3 on their 50 foot tall high definition screens. I'm in.

Your $25 (or preferably more) donation goes straight to the American Diabetes Association and gets you in for a night of Halo 3 in Hi-Def! Five hours of gaming, can you take it? To sweeten the deal, I'll state that I'm terrible at this game, so if you want to come an 'pwn' me... it won't be hard.

Here are the details:

• When: Thursday evening, October 11th, 7:00 - Midnight
• Where: Cinetopia - Map & Web site
• Register: http://iammasterchief.com/ with the RSVP code "FIGHTDIABETES"

It should be a blast. More details on Scott's site.

The biggest piece of the new update is of course the wireless iTunes store. But even cooler in my opinion is that Safari is again, working with .NET 2.0 AJAX. Ok back to work on iPhone applications I could build.. hmmm.....

Update: People have been reporting the ability to listen to .wav files in email attachments. I just tried with my Vonage voice mail account, and it's not working for me. Bummer. I was really hoping that would be something that did work.

 I'm headed to Las Vegas this Monday through Wednesday. I'm going with one of my best friends, it's something we try to do once a year, especially since we don't work together anymore. We'll play a lot of poker, and Eric has told me that his last trip he learned to play craps. So I suspect I'll be learning to play craps this time, apparently it's a ton of fun.

Poker is my favorite thing to do there. Nothing high stakes really, just a little $2/$4 limit Texas Hold 'Em. Keep an eye on my camera blog, I'll be updating it with random pictures from our trip. We fly out Monday morning @ 8:30 AM and come back Wednesday night around 11PM.

I'm looking forward to three days with no kids, is that bad? I'm sure that when I get back I'll be glad to get home.

I purchased the device from Newegg for just under $200. Seems like a good deal, and I'm impressed with the manufacturing of the device, the thing is heavy and it's solid. It comes with USB, CAT5, and power cables, pretty nice for the price considering when you buy a printer, you don't even get a USB cable.

The NAS drive arrived around lunch time today. I was working from home so that I could sign for it when it arrived. I immediately took it out to the garage, and put it with all my networking gear. I unboxed it, plugged in the CAT5 and power, and went back inside. I sat down at my laptop and ran AngryIPScanner, looked for the new device, and opened up Internet Explorer and connected to the IP address over HTTP.

There was a page with an administration link, and a list of all the current shares that were setup. I clicked the administration link, and was challenged to enter security credentials, a guess of admin/admin and I was in. First order of business, change the admin password. Then I renamed the device "NAS". So now all my network devices can see a 'thing' called NAS on the network. It even picked up DHCP, DNS, and the gateway all automatically, nice.

I created three shares initially in the the LaCie interface, itunes, photos, and misc. I then terminaled into my desktop machine where the majority of my media and photos are. I mapped a drive to the NAS itunes share, and after entering the userid and password, I was connected. I started to copy all of my itunes and photo files to the respective shares on the NAS, I did the same with my laptop.

I copied Gigabytes of data to the device, it pretty much finished around 4:00 PM. So the copy process of almost 50GB was not too slow really. Here are some screen shots of the device's user interface, it's not glamorous, but it's clean, and makes sense.

Impressions
The thing just feels good when you hold it. Like it's really solid and engineered well. Setup took me less than a minute. I'm going to post more about the details of the device in the coming weeks. My plan is to put all of our media onto it, music, photos, movies, etc. Thus having an entry point for all computers on my network to access said data. I'd also like to create some sort of automated backup to it as well.

I have not installed the LaCie software yet, but I'm curious what's on the disk, so I probably will. More on that in a later post. So far, I'm totally stoked for the amount of money I spent, for what I've actually gotten. How often can you say that?

Screenshots of the User Interface (web based from the device)

Here is the status screen that shows the shares, and what services can connect to them.

Network details

Disk usage metrics (just after I started copying to it)

Service status screen

He's not walking yet, but if you distract him, he'll stand there for like a minute before he 'realizes' he's standing.

Pretty funny.

I just went to the Apple site, and went through the quick steps to get my $100 credit. If you need to get your credit, go here, and type in your cell phone number, and serial number. The serial number of your iPhone can be found inside the Settings > General > About section. Once you have entered these two items, you're sent an SMS message containing an code.

Simply enter this code, and your phone number into step two on the web site, and that's it. You are presented with a page that has your $100 credit. Just print it out for use in a brick-and-mortar store, or copy and paste the credit number and pin for use on the Apple Online Store.

I was going to get a new Nano, but opted for a iPhone dock that will connect to our home stereo (with remote!), a 2nd pair of earbuds with the little button on them for answering calls and advancing tracks, and lastly a $25 iTunes gift card. My total cost after the rebate was $3.