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Apr. 8th, 2005 02:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2The Star Wars L337 Trailer in case you haven't seen it yet.
Something like 8 or 9 months ago Ron at work installed a new hard drive in my computer, which had Win XP on it... but he didn't hook it up immediately. He wanted to, but this was a week when my co-worker Jim was on vacation so I begged Ron to wait until Jim was back -- more chaos in a chaotic week was something I didn't need. Unfortunately Ron has a short attention span and since he couldn't fix my computer RIGHT THAT MINUTE, it got ignored for 8-9 months. He told me to back things up... but what was I supposed to do, keep backing up every day for the next year?
Anyway, my computer (which was using Win ME at the time shudder ) is generally in use from 6 am or so to 12 midnight, since I share my desk with someone else. So it's not easy for Ron to find a good time to work on it. So... he decided to do this while I was at Norwescon.
What this meant is that I came back from Norwescon and along with having to catch up on everything and being very busy, I got to spend hours reinstalling rate programs, copying things to my computer that I'd saved on the network drive (my last save was about a month earlier), importing all my old e-mail, and generally trying to get my new computer set up so that it worked properly. It didn't help that Ron had forgotten to install Office so I didn't have Word, Excell, etc.
I found a lot of little, annoying things about Win XP that I hadn't noticed at home. One, I have to run a lot of old dos rate programs still... Win XP runs them terribly, the whole computer slows down, some of them refuse to open in windowed format, they all open in the same spot so I have to drag them to the side every single time... it's a pain.
Another thing that was kind of amusing... files that I had created and saved using Wordpad in Win ME were unreadable by the version of Wordpad in Win XP. Once I had Word installed, I just opened them and saved them as Rich Text Format files. Pretty sad that RTF is a more reliable format than Word's own DOC format. Not that this is a new revelation to me or anything.
The other thing that we discovered was pretty amusing... in Win 98/ME you could customize a folder in such a way that when you opened it up, there was a picture in the background behind the various icons. Probably not a feature that many people use or know exists... but at work we use so many different rate programs that it's common for all of us rate clerks to have a folder full of our rate programs that we always keep open and sitting on one side of the screen. So I'd added a picture to the background that amused me and didn't make it too hard to see the icons.
Thing is, when Ron was setting up new desktops for Gary (who uses my computer in the daytime) and for Ellie (who was also upgraded to Win XP recently), he grabbed MY rates folder off the network drive, because he knew that I'd backed it up fairly recently and had pretty much every program a rate clerk should want or need... the folder only contains shortcuts of course, but using that he could tell what programs needed to be installed.
The copies of my folder all had my background picture. But Gary, who has problems with his eyes, had trouble seeing the icons. He didn't know how the picture got there so he asked Tim for help in removing it.
Well, as it turns out, customizing your folder with a picture in the background when you open it simply isn't a feature in Win XP. You can't do it... and therefore, you also can't undo it. Tim had to create a brand new folder and move all of the shortcuts from one to the other. :D
Win XP does have a folder customization option which allows you to overlay a picture on top of a folder icon within that folder, which you can see if you're set to view thumbnails... I guess it's to help you remember what's in that folder, but it seemed pretty useless and stupid to me.
Something like 8 or 9 months ago Ron at work installed a new hard drive in my computer, which had Win XP on it... but he didn't hook it up immediately. He wanted to, but this was a week when my co-worker Jim was on vacation so I begged Ron to wait until Jim was back -- more chaos in a chaotic week was something I didn't need. Unfortunately Ron has a short attention span and since he couldn't fix my computer RIGHT THAT MINUTE, it got ignored for 8-9 months. He told me to back things up... but what was I supposed to do, keep backing up every day for the next year?
Anyway, my computer (which was using Win ME at the time shudder ) is generally in use from 6 am or so to 12 midnight, since I share my desk with someone else. So it's not easy for Ron to find a good time to work on it. So... he decided to do this while I was at Norwescon.
What this meant is that I came back from Norwescon and along with having to catch up on everything and being very busy, I got to spend hours reinstalling rate programs, copying things to my computer that I'd saved on the network drive (my last save was about a month earlier), importing all my old e-mail, and generally trying to get my new computer set up so that it worked properly. It didn't help that Ron had forgotten to install Office so I didn't have Word, Excell, etc.
I found a lot of little, annoying things about Win XP that I hadn't noticed at home. One, I have to run a lot of old dos rate programs still... Win XP runs them terribly, the whole computer slows down, some of them refuse to open in windowed format, they all open in the same spot so I have to drag them to the side every single time... it's a pain.
Another thing that was kind of amusing... files that I had created and saved using Wordpad in Win ME were unreadable by the version of Wordpad in Win XP. Once I had Word installed, I just opened them and saved them as Rich Text Format files. Pretty sad that RTF is a more reliable format than Word's own DOC format. Not that this is a new revelation to me or anything.
The other thing that we discovered was pretty amusing... in Win 98/ME you could customize a folder in such a way that when you opened it up, there was a picture in the background behind the various icons. Probably not a feature that many people use or know exists... but at work we use so many different rate programs that it's common for all of us rate clerks to have a folder full of our rate programs that we always keep open and sitting on one side of the screen. So I'd added a picture to the background that amused me and didn't make it too hard to see the icons.
Thing is, when Ron was setting up new desktops for Gary (who uses my computer in the daytime) and for Ellie (who was also upgraded to Win XP recently), he grabbed MY rates folder off the network drive, because he knew that I'd backed it up fairly recently and had pretty much every program a rate clerk should want or need... the folder only contains shortcuts of course, but using that he could tell what programs needed to be installed.
The copies of my folder all had my background picture. But Gary, who has problems with his eyes, had trouble seeing the icons. He didn't know how the picture got there so he asked Tim for help in removing it.
Well, as it turns out, customizing your folder with a picture in the background when you open it simply isn't a feature in Win XP. You can't do it... and therefore, you also can't undo it. Tim had to create a brand new folder and move all of the shortcuts from one to the other. :D
Win XP does have a folder customization option which allows you to overlay a picture on top of a folder icon within that folder, which you can see if you're set to view thumbnails... I guess it's to help you remember what's in that folder, but it seemed pretty useless and stupid to me.
