A deserved break from Technology

Christmas in Zermatt

Remote Assistance problems

Hmmm, tried out remote assistance now I'm back home. Well it works, but only if ZoneAlarm is turned off at both ends.

Not sure that is something I can live with.

The wierdest thing is the remote computer seems to be logging the IP address as my private one not the public one - very wierd!

Stage 4 - Handover

Sadly, due to the time taken to do all the conversions and resolve the unexpected printer and scanner problems, handover / training time was somewhat limited.

Thankfully the preparation in advance of links to various tutorials FAQs and documentation meant that my FIL could get started reasonably easily.

Stage 3 - Test, test, test and test again

Having built the PC, migrated the data, now it was time to test that everything worked as expected.

That meant the printer (an Old HP Deskjet clone) and the scanner (a similarly old device) needed to be connected and made to work.

"Never ever, buy cheap clone peripheral devices"

These two devices took another 2 hours each to get working properly. Eventually everything was good to go and the whole setup was transported back to it's new home.

The new PC was plugged into the NTL Broadband that had been previously setup except it hadn't been activated (another 30 minutes on the phone getting that done).

It was then time to do the final check that everything was working and handover the new PC to the FIL.

And a well deserved cup of tea was drunk :-)

Stage 2 - Migrating his data...

It takes no time at all to put together a PC...
a couple of hours for the screwdriver part, an hour for the OS, an hour for tailoring the environment, another hour or so for the applications.

That's 6 - 8 hours tops for the whole job

...and then the data migration starts...and goes on and on forever.

I was faced with the task of getting all my FIL's documents that had been written either in MS Word 95 or Lotus Word Pro 96 into a format that could be read by Open Office. The MS Word files were no great problem, but, oh boy, that Lotus Word Pro stuff. I had to open EVERY SINGLE FILE in Word Pro and save as RTF format (Not even the Word save as version was new enough for Open Office to deal with).

That job alone took as long as everything else put together. Thankfully, the transfer of mail and address book from Outlook Express to Thunderbird was a simple job.

Stage 1 - Father in Law (FIL)'s PC Build

The FIL PC project hit the road running when I went back to the UK. His old PC, an AMD Dothan based box was just about coping with basic Word Processing and occasional e-mail.

A look at his old case revealed it wasn't going to be suitable for the new board, so aside from the Floppy Drive, the whole PC was rebuilt with the following new and recovered parts:

Motherboard: Asrock 939 DUAL-SATA2
Memory (2x): Samsung 512MB DDR400 PC3200 RAM
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice Core
HDDD: Seagate Barracuda 80GB SATA HDD
Video: Gigabyte GF 6200 Turbocache 256MB
FDD: From the old PC
CDRW: An old Liteon I had spare
We added to that an AMW M179D 17" TFT to replace his Blurry 17" CRT (Christmas came early)

The software build was based on Windows XP Home plus all the free stuff in the links that you can see on the right.

All the new hardware was plugged in setup and running and XP installed in about 4 hours.