WhimsyLand

So I get back home from a meeting off-site and shortly after I get back my Outlook says it's receiving message 1092 of 65536 emails.  Now, I get a lot of emails, but that seemed a bit excessive.  Sure enough, Outlook 2007 has decided to ask for all the emails on the server that I've already received in the past.  We maintain our own mail server here (MDaemon) and it hasn't gone down in months, my suspicion is that it's on the Outlook side that things have gone awry.  My main system has been an intermittent dog ever since I upgraded all my MS Office to 2007.  The problem (which is apparently well known to all, judging from the negative Google entries) is that Outlook 2007 is slow to begin with, and particularly so with large PST files.  PST files are the large container that represent all your email, folders, contacts and so on that you see on Outlook.  If you aren't running MS Exchange Server (and I'm not that much of a masochist), then it's pretty much certain that you're using local PST files for  your email repository.

My main work system is a decently fast machine with 4 GB of RAM, a 350 GB SATA drive, a slower 20 GB PATA system drive,  and 3.2 GHz Pentium on a recent Gigabyte motherboard.  This system should be very fast, and actually used to be before Outlook 2007.  I run Registry Mechanic and Spybot Search and Destroy regularly, and I don't have any viruses running around the office (thanks to our BSD-based GnatBox firewall/NAT).  What I really need to do is bite the bullet and reload XP Pro on a new 10,000 RPM Raptor hard disk and swap out my P4 for a Quad Core, which I've ordered.  That would get rid of the one slowish 20GB old drive in my system, too.  The real pain − and I means a couple of days worth  − is reloading all the software I use after I've reinstalled XP Pro.   I have about 100 applications on my machine and I use them at one point or another throughout the year.  That includes, for example Visual Studio 6, VS 2003, VS 2005 and VS 2008.  Also, every Microsoft productivity app you've ever heard of.  A dozen media converters.  Et cetera, et cetera.  Some of these would be fairly easy (though time-consuming) to reload, such as the applications from our MSDN subscription.  Others will require me to hunt down the registration information, as I originally purchased them online. 

The cause of all this pain is the near impossibility of just "copying" your Windows system to a new drive.  What you really want to do is tell one Windows system to connect to an existing one and transfer all your applications, including the registry information associated with them.  You also want to keep the same Documents and Settings, so you don't have to start all over again, lose passwords, and other real nuisances that happen when Windows decides that you're a new user or have joined a new domain.  I've been told that Norton Ghost will copy completely everything to a new drive, essentially cloning the old drive.  I may have to authenticate Windows XP again due to hardware changes, but that's OK.  If anyone has done this, drop me a line.

OK, I fibbed a bit.  It wasn't an "off-site meeting" per se, but actually having lunch with Malinda and Barb, except that Barb joined us by speaker phone.  I got out my nifty picnic basket that can hold eatables on one side and two bottles of wine on the other and stopped by Heidi's Deli for sandwiches and birch beer, which isn't as good as having Montrachet with your eggplant sandwich, but not bad.   Barb reminded me to tell you all that we have a number of killerbee MMM Literary Salons coming up.  The next one is on Friday, February 22d and the guest author is Thaddeus Rutkowski, the MMM fiction editor.  He's a great reader (and noted slam poet) and the event should be its usual wine-lubricated success.  We provide the libations and you bring any potluck concoction that fits your budget.  Thad is also running a multi-genre workshop on Saturday.  Details are on the MMM web site.

Well, only 23,000 more emails to go . . . talk to you later today.

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