A few colleagues just shared a utility they use to automatically change thewir desktop background image at preset intervals, its called John’s Background Switcher (JBS). I’ve seen literally dozens of these type of utilities over the years and have not been impressed with any of them. Eitehr because their user interface was terrible or I didn’t trust the software not to by spyware. What I like about JBS is the number of sources you can configure for photos – it supports your photos in the the Piuctures folder of your computer plus a load of internet photo sharing sites, including Flickr. What more, you can tell it to use tags, so I’ve set it up on my laptop to display photos tagged with “mountains” it finds on Flickr.
Lets see if I keep this running on my laptop for long, or get annoyed with the number of average photos it finds…
I picked up my replacement laptop on Wednesday and yesterday used Windows Easy Transfer to move my settings and data across from the temporary Windows XP laptop. The process was really simple and I was impressed with how quickly it moved my 5.25Gb of data and settings (less than 45 minutes).
The only things which failed were a 2Gb Outlook PST file which seemed to get corrupted during the transfer (I just used a USB memory stick to copy this over again) and network printers (which I needed to delete and re-install). End to end, it took me about an hour to move off my old laptop onto the new one – complete with all my IE favourites, email, address book, documents and files, desktop settings etc etc etc. I used an Easy Transfer cable which connects the two computers via USB, but you could just as easily use the network or CD/DVD/External HD/USB memory stick.
So, next time you buy a new PC don’t go and waste money paying PC World to transfer files, and don’t fall for the salesman selling you some additional software – just use Windows Easy Transfer which is part of Vista and a free download for XP.
I’ve been using a spare Laptop running Windows XP since my main laptop was stolen last Friday, and its been a revelation to me. There are quite a few Vista features I miss and some are not that obvious before you’ve lost them. In no particula order;
- Search built into the Start Menu – I realise now that I use it to find programs more than documents.
- Variable sized thumbnails – I have load of photos at home and viewing them in XP is painful.
- Side Bar – this surprised me, but I use the Side Bar far more than I thought. I miss my clocks showing the different Timezones of team I work in, the C89.5 radio gadget, my weather station gadget and the calendar gadget. Without these I’m definietly less productive (ok, the weather station and radio gadgets dont affect productivity).
- Suspend/Hibernate – now this may be driver/hardware based but the suspend and resume process on the temporary laptop isn’t as reliable/consistent as on the old Vista laptop. I’ve gone back to the “flaming rucksack” days (where the laptop wakes up in the rucksack then overheats).
- UAC/RunAs – Even under XP I never used to use an admin account day-to-day, and I’m now reminded how much better Vista handles elevated access compared to XP (networking, timezone etc).
As I said, some of these aren’t that obvious until you’ve lose ‘em. To be fair, I should also list the stuff I don’t miss;
- Folder view in Explorer – the lack of a simple folder view in Explorer windows annoys me: I prefer the XP one
- Startup time – the XP machine doesn’t bog down as much on first startup