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How Long Does it Take You to Tweak a New Box?
An anonymous reader asks: "When you get a new computer, how long does it take to make it 'home'? On a Windows system, there seem to be a huge number of preferences I have to choose before it is really comfortable (doing things like: installing software; changing the wallpaper and color schemes; start menu layout; and so forth). How long do you have to fiddle with computer until you have it set up the way you like? Do you use any shortcuts to speed up the process?"
Not very long. After years of working with computers (over 20), I've found keeping it simple is best. I change the background, arrange icons how I like and that's about it these days, whether it's windows or OSX or Ubuntu. If the OS can't accommodate this simple style I don't use it.
That'd be great if nothing every got updated. I actually tried this once and by the time I was ready to start over from scratch I realized it was almost easier to do an actual clean install with current-version apps than try and upgrade everything from 0.4-2.0 versions ago. Now I just keep a directory around with all the commonly installed apps, and when I get an update, I try to remember to put the new install version in the appropriate folder. I've almost given up that for a simple list of apps, and a directory with critical drivers. Things change too fast to have a "stable" image that's good for more than 6 months or so, and with XP running stably for longer than that (my current install is 2.5 years old), the image is just useless.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Why arent you just keeping your /home partition backed up? When I installed Kubuntu I let it run overnight with a huge batch of things to download and install. That took about 10 minutes to set up. Then another 15 minutes to copy /home from my old machine. So, call it 25 minutes of work for a fully customized and tweaked installation?
The registry had two important goals, consolidating configuration information into one location with an easy storage and retrieval method, and application interopability enhancement.
.NET v2.
Ya know why CLSID is such a large part of the registry? It has nothing to do with preventing piracy.
Ya know how CurrentControlSet is so thorough, and how it's off on it's own branch of HKLM? Yeah, if you were to replace all of those values with the correct values for the machine that you were moving to (primarily system driver and hardware reference information) then you could in theory just boot windows back up without ever having a glitch. Theory though, not practice. The theory is sound because MS designed the registry to be modular. It's not their fault that other companies don't respect the sandboxing that MS set up, and it's hard for them to enforce that people play nice, but look at the strides they've made via their IDEs (which is where most people write the said crappy software) and
Most of the problems that people have with drivers or program interoperability stem from those two registry branches anyways, is another good reason why all IT folks should be able to recite the major points of the registry, as well as knowing all the places where windows looks when it goes to start the various functions.
This is one of the few shortcomings I can find with the registry, but it's not the fault of MS as a whole, but rather the failure of different groups to consolidate on one storage location for important settings. Then again, two of the reasons why there were so many different locations where settings may have been in the flat files were for security through obfuscation and because sometimes the maximum size you could read on a flat file could have been exceeded due to the number of settings that you might want, so MS designers purposely chose to store info in multiple places, such as the load differences between system.ini and win.ini.
So I've been going in this direction to come back to, the registry didn't have anything to do with limiting piracy, if anything, it's the reason why so many people want to run Windows, even if they don't want to pay for it. The real thing that seems to be annoying to so many geeks is the oobe libs.
Need I go further?
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