A real world example - Setting up a new PC

Last week I wrote a post about the steps you should follow in setting up that new PC you got for the holidays. Now I am back with a real world example as I have just returned from setting up a new PC for a family member.

The mission was to setup a new Windows 7 (64-bit) HP Desktop and bring over all of the good parts (without the "bad parts") from a 5 year old Compaq desktop and after 2 days of work we can say that the mission was accomplished. To guide the process we created a checklist of items that combined the best practices of setting up a new PC along with an inventory of the old PC's applications, data and functions to help ensure all applicable parts were migrated.

Here are the milestones and notes from the project.

• Make or create restore disks. While the HP PC did not come with restore disks, the Windows 7 O/S on the PC did have a nice utility that easily walked me through the process and the I created the 3 restore DVDs along with a recovery disk (that Windows 7 also walked me through). I even got to take advantage to the built in Lightscribe functionality to label each of the disks appropriately. In terms of Lightscribe, while this was my first hands-on experience with it, it was easy to use, but the results were just OK, compared to putting a real label on the disks or writing on them with disk markers.
  
• Update your PC. It was interesting that not once during the setup did Windows 7 ask me to install any updates, but since this was a significant item on my checklist, I navigated to to Windows Update and forced it to apply all of the O/S updates and patches, which took place without an issue.
  
• Setup your anti-virus application. The HP PC came with a 6 month trial of Norton's anti-virus which we chose to activate and subscribe to vs. transferring the license from the AVG product we were using on the old PC. This decision was based on two reasons: 1) The AVG website made it very difficult to figure out how to transfer the license and 2) my past experience with uninstalling AV packages tells me it is usual a messy affair and I didn't want to have remnants of Norton hanging around and causing issues. While we kept Norton, taking advantage of the 28% discount they were offering based on the new PC purchase was not well done. We followed the instructions on the enclosed paperwork, but it was very unclear if we were really getting a discount as there was no displaying of the base price or a discount amount. Going directly to the Norton site didn't help as identifying and comparing the products proved to be difficult at best. At the end of the day we went with the simplest method to ensue a good initial experience and less issues down the road. In my book Norton is a fine product, but their marketing process leaves something to be desired.
  
• Move or install your software. This was a time consuming but straight forward process thanks to having the various CDs or access to the appropriate web sites. What we did experience was some of the Windows 7 incompatibilities as we were moving from 32-bit Windows XP to 64-bit Windows 7. The net result was we were not able to install the existing web camera, the film scanner or the Palm Tungsten EX synchronization software. The web camera and file scanner vendors had not created 64-bit drivers and the Windows 7 generic drivers would not work with these devices. Palm did have an updated Palm desktop product that works with Windows 7, but for some strange reason no longer supports USB synchronization with a 64-bit O/S. Palm will work via Bluetooth synchronization, but the new HP PC did not have built in Bluetooth capabilities and finding a Bluetooth adapter that works with Windows 7 was beyond what we could find in the local stores.
  
• Install the common plug-ins and utility software. Installed Adobe's PDF Reader, the Firefox browser, Thunderbird mail client (the newly released version 3 is very nice), RoboForm for password management, Xmarks for bookmark management, Picasa for photo management, YammerFox for managing our families Yammer site, Microsoft's SynchToy for data synchronization (more about this in the backup bullet) and Dell's DataSafe client for off-site data backup.
  
• Develop a backup strategy. As noted above, we installed SynchToy, which copies all of the changed data files from the HP's hard drive to an attached USB drive every night by leveraging both SynchToy and its simple integration with Windows Scheduler. In addition we setup a scheduled Windows Backup process that every Sunday creates a full Windows backup on the attached USB drive. In terms of off-site backups, we configured Dell's DataSafe client to copy all changed data files to Dell's storage cloud every night.
• Remove the "bloatware" that comes with many PCs. In terms of new PCs, there wasn't too much bloatware, but we removed it as we found it.
• Register your PC with the vendor. HP made this process as simple as possible.
• Synchronize your browser favorites. As noted above, we installed Xmarks on the old PC and copied its bookmarks to the Xmarks repository. Once we installed Xmarks on the new PC and signed in, all of old bookmarks become part of the new PC's bookmarks. While you can move bookmarks without a tool like Xmarks, using the tool not only moved the bookmarks but keeps the data current in the Xmarks repository giving us another backup of this data.
  

Hopefully this real world example will help you in setting up your or your friends / families new PCs, but let me know how your experience goes.

In case you missed my post on my travels to do this work here is the link to that story.