Moving Over the Software

By Jerry Pournelle

February 20, 2006

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It takes hours to format a 500-GB drive, unless you use "Quick Format." I never do that. The full format procedure tests each sector as the formatting is applied, and in my view that leaves one less thing to worry about. When building Alexis, I formatted the drive while having dinner.

Once that was done--that is, both the formatting and the dinner--installation of Windows XP Professional went smoothly. The ASUS installation disk has a whole bunch of goodies on it that aren't all apparent; that is, there is more than one tab on the initial menu, and you want to notice that. Once the ASUS installation disk brought in the drivers for sound and Ethernet those started working automagically, so except for the formatting time, it took under two hours to get Alexis joined to my Active Directory network and updated.

Next was installation of Microsoft Office. I prepared for that by shutting down Outlook on Anastasia, then copying over Documents and Settings/Jerryp/local settings/application data/Microsoft/Outlook from Anastasia to Alexis. That folder contains outlook.pst, archive.pst, and several other specialty data files. I installed Microsoft Office, then started Outlook for the first time. There was some hoohaw, but persistence pays. I did have to enter my mail accounts with passwords manually. One of my mail accounts uses a non-standard port. I hadn't written down everything, but the remedy for that was to go back to Anastasia, pull her Ethernet connection so she couldn't go out to the Internet and grab mail, and examine the settings on my mail accounts. They're all in ASCII except the passwords. Those you'll have to know.

Eventually Outlook looked the same on both machines. Well, nearly the same. They were configured the same, but on Alexis all the text looked awful. That would take some tweaking.

First tweak was to go into Outlook and set the mail fonts to Georgia 12. Then go into Control Panel/Display/Appearance/effects and change the smoothing function to Cleartype; that's probably the most important tweak for making text look better.

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