Thu, 08 Oct 2009

Upgrading a Workstation

When you are assigned a workstation at your "real job", you start working on it. After years, you find that you need to upgrade to a new workstation and the adventure begins. I am going through this now . . .

It's interesting the amount of stuff and you accumulate in the years of using a workstation. You install tools, create scripts, workout methods of doing things and then . . . you need to upgrade. WOW!

Now, you need to make sure that things are migrated from you workstation. But, of course, things change, programs upgrade, drivers change, technology advances and it's not Kansas any more, Dorothy . . .

Simple things like all those configuration changes you made . . . that little macro you wrote . . . those favorites you accumulated.

Oh and by the way, ff you're working in a corporate environment, security issues, standards, even entire programs and operating systems may be involved. In my case, this isn't an issue, except for some minor security policies, but, the migration effort from one laptop to another is still a major undertaking.

I have noticed that you tend to get comfortable with your current environment, even, if, like mine, it's really too slow to be very productive. Because you have configured it over a long time, you tend to forget what you have done. Now, you come to the new workstation and, hey! where's my script! or "sheesh, I forgot about that tweek." As you work, you find things that you use frequently but which non-standard and implemented by you, often years ago.

The upgrade is a chance, however, to clean things up. It gives you an excuse to take all the accumulated stuff and remove it from the system. One of the things that was pointed out to me is that my profile has over 400 megabytes of application data. That's all the stuff that's associated with the applications you use (or don't use, since you have removed them from your workstation or just don't use them). These accumulated files and entries can slow your system, especially at boot up.

So what have I learned. Here are a few things:

1. If you're on a corporate network, keep data files on your shared drive.
   We have a directory assigned to each of us on the corporate LAN, the nice thing about it is that it's backed up regularly. It's also nice not to have to copy all the material to the shared drive just to move it onto the new computer.
2. Remember and backup configurations and macros.
   When you move or upgrade your system, you can retrieve them.
3. Backup things like site configurations and other material that you might need.
4. Record things other places.
   I have started keeping a USB drive that I can move important or personal things onto.

Things are straightening out. I'm sure months from now, I'll find something that I have missed, but, by then it's way too late, so I'll live with it . . .

posted 18:28 [/Technology] permanent link