After 4 years, I have finally decided that it was time to reinstall my operating system. The computer would not turn off on its own any longer, I had to push the button and my 2GB of RAM seemed to get used up too fast, it was high time to do something about it. As I have a Sony Vaio computer, I have a recovery disk and the whole shebang gets plopped back in. The only problem I discovered was that I had changed the hard drive partitions and that means that they will disappear with the reinstallation. So I was busy yesterday backing everything up onto an external hard drive and then this morning I took the plunge.
After a few false starts, that's when I realized what was really going to happen to everything. I was set to go. It took quite a while to copy everything back on the hard drive from the DVDs. So the first thing I did was uninstall all those programs that came preinstalled and I was never going to use. I am planning on using open source program versions this time around.
The first real snag I ran into was setting up my widescreen LCD monitor. I had the driver and it showed up, but I could not change the display to 1680 x 1050 pixels. Then I remembered that I had to update my NVidia driver when I first got the new monitor a few months back. Well, that did the trick and nowI can read my text clearly.
The next scary thing was moving my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles to the new installation. I had done all the homework and printed the instructions out, but still it did not work. So I worked around that. I restored the profile from MozBackup. It kind of worked, but in Firefox where did all my add-ons go, they did not make it. Luckily, I had moved the whole Firefox directory from my documents and settings folder to the external hard drive. So I grabbed everything inside the profiles folder and plopped it into the new default profile folder, crossed my findgers and started Firefox. To my utter surprise it worked and I am back up running. I used the same for Thunderbird, where I had only just recently created a new profile and somehow did not tell MozBackup to use that instead of the default one. Well, I got everything going.
By now all my basic programs: virus, zip, pdf and music are going and I realized that with my widescreen monitor it just did not make sense to have the taskbar at the bottom or top (that's where I had it yesterday) and make my screen length shorter. So I moved it to the left side of the screen. First I placed it on the right, but being a lefty it was awkward to right across the screen to the buttons and moved it to the left side of the screen. I like it and I don't even notice that the screen is narrower now.
Now I wanted to upload an image with this post, but I can't. I get an error. So I will have to do some research. I guess I haven't installed something yet that is needed. As it has worked before.
After a few false starts, that's when I realized what was really going to happen to everything. I was set to go. It took quite a while to copy everything back on the hard drive from the DVDs. So the first thing I did was uninstall all those programs that came preinstalled and I was never going to use. I am planning on using open source program versions this time around.
The first real snag I ran into was setting up my widescreen LCD monitor. I had the driver and it showed up, but I could not change the display to 1680 x 1050 pixels. Then I remembered that I had to update my NVidia driver when I first got the new monitor a few months back. Well, that did the trick and nowI can read my text clearly.
The next scary thing was moving my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles to the new installation. I had done all the homework and printed the instructions out, but still it did not work. So I worked around that. I restored the profile from MozBackup. It kind of worked, but in Firefox where did all my add-ons go, they did not make it. Luckily, I had moved the whole Firefox directory from my documents and settings folder to the external hard drive. So I grabbed everything inside the profiles folder and plopped it into the new default profile folder, crossed my findgers and started Firefox. To my utter surprise it worked and I am back up running. I used the same for Thunderbird, where I had only just recently created a new profile and somehow did not tell MozBackup to use that instead of the default one. Well, I got everything going.
By now all my basic programs: virus, zip, pdf and music are going and I realized that with my widescreen monitor it just did not make sense to have the taskbar at the bottom or top (that's where I had it yesterday) and make my screen length shorter. So I moved it to the left side of the screen. First I placed it on the right, but being a lefty it was awkward to right across the screen to the buttons and moved it to the left side of the screen. I like it and I don't even notice that the screen is narrower now.
Now I wanted to upload an image with this post, but I can't. I get an error. So I will have to do some research. I guess I haven't installed something yet that is needed. As it has worked before.
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