My New Toy -- Followup

My new system is all set up and ready to go to OzFox. It's way faster than my old system, Vista is fun and attractive, and you can't beat a 17" widescreen display. I even hooked up my 20" LCD monitor, which was the main display when my old laptop was docked, as a second monitor. I very quickly got used to having 3500 horizontal pixels to work with!

Some of the work in setting up the new system had nothing to do with the new system; it was fixing file paths. I had C: and D: partitions on my old system, with only system files on C: and everything else, including applications, on D:. The logic was that if I needed to rebuild my system, I'd reinstall the operating system on C: but all of my files on D: would be untouched. Of course, I never ended up doing that, and had to live with a relatively small C: partition which required me to clean up every year or so to eliminate out of disk space errors. I decided to stick with a single partition on the new system and put all of the non-application files from the former D: partition into one folder hierarchy so all the relative paths would stay the same. Of course, absolute paths are different, so it took me a while to go through all of my projects, locating all of the files from places like the VFP home directory and FFC folder, and fixing paths to include files in various places.

The other thing that took a while that I wasn't expecting is changing from using Outlook for calendar, Outlook Express for email, and FeedDemon for RSS feeds to using Outlook 2007 for all of that. The hardest part was getting messages out of Outlook Express and into Outlook. There may be an easier way, but I didn't find it after a couple of hours of dorking around. I ended up exporting from Outlook Express and importing into Outlook on the old system, then exporting from that Outlook and importing into Outlook on the new system. I really like Outlook 2007 and don't know why I stuck with Outlook Express for so long.

The only slight glitch so far is that Dell installs a cut-down version of Roxio for CD and DVD burning. One of the drivers that comes with Roxio, the Sonic Solutions DLA driver, isn't compatible with Vista, so at startup, a "this driver is blocked due to compatibility issues" alert comes up, followed by a Program Compatibility Assistant dialog. Clicking OK once is bad enough, but for some reason, the alert and dialog would come up seven times on system start. Even worse, if I stuck a DVD in the drive, the alert/dialog combination would come up continuously until I removed the disc. This quickly became a huge PITA.

Fortunately, Google helped me find the solution at http://forums.support.roxio.com/index.php?showtopic=17098. It does require a couple of restarts, but 10 minutes later, I'm good to go.