WET

Hey Dethtron- I thought you were on your awesome 1 week summer break and were going to be blogging every day, where the fuck were you yesterday?

Well, I got stuck out in the suburbs trying to get my Step-dad's new computer setup. This should have only taken me a couple of hours, as it was just a matter of installing Kaspersky, Office, some stock trading software, and transferring just under 10GB of data. Well, it would have only taken me a few hours, had not the forces of darkness been conspiring against me.

I will preface the vitriol that is about to spew forth from my fingertips by saying that I'm 29 and I'm a PC. Not a fan of Macs over here in spite of all of the reasons I should be: I use my computer for audio production, I have hipster douche tendencies now and again, and I enjoy fancy pants, slick electronics. Something about Apple just bugs the shit out of me though. Part of it is the lack of functional software available. I think that I also need the imminent threat of malware hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles to keep me motivated. I will also say that I had no major problems with Windows Vista. XP was better and I'm liking 7 best of all so far, but Vista was not the giant turd-burger that everyone has made it out to be. I should know, I've used it a fair amount and sold hundreds of copies. The hatred for Vista can all be linked back to a less than subtle smear campaign from Apple along with idiot consumers being resistant to change (and being worried about Vista being the next Windows ME- which was, in fact, a giant stinky turd-burger).

Getting back to my experiences yesterday, everything went swimmingly until it came to the data transfer. First thing I tried was to go with what I know: sharing files over the network. Well of course that wouldn't work, since my step-brother set up the network and all of the computers can see each other, but not access anything (he did something similar with mom's home network* as well- why they didn't have me set that shit up, I'll never know...). I could always reconfigure the network, but that is not something I felt like doing at the time. Well great, I'll just use a flash drive, I thought. ....and fuck, I left my flash drive at home. Does my step-dad have one? Of course. Is it a 64mb drive? Also yes. Fuck, no way I'm transferring 10 gigs of shit on that thing- back to the drawing board. Wait, I'll just use DVDs; it's a little bit of a pain in the ass, but this should do the trick. Does the new laptop have an optical drive? No. Well I'm boned.

By this time I had all of 15 minutes invested in the transfer, so I'm still feeling good. Running through the list of options in my head I realized that I hadn't tried the Windows Easy Transfer (WET) utility**. I had read somewhere that it had been reworked heavily since it was released with Vista and actually works most of the time now. So, I install the software on the XP laptop and get a network transfer going. Somehow it finds significantly more data than I had planned on transferring, but I think it was pulling Internet explorer settings and all kinds of stuff that weren't entirely necessary. About 2 hours into the process it encounters a fatal error and won't continue the transfer. Moreover, the XP PC can't open WET any more. Better still, no amount of uninstalling and reinstalling of WET will ever make it work. Turns out that what happens all too often with WET is that internal timing issues generally cause this shit not to work unless you are doing a Windows 7 to Windows 7 transfer. Nothing is available help wise on-line. Many people have reported this issue, and nobody is offering a fix. Checking Microsoft's help site provided some entertainment as they danced around the issue with other people, never answering their real questions.

At this point I do what I should have done hours earlier. I left the house, bought a $10 flash drive and donated it to the cause. Less than 30 minutes later the transfer was complete. Moral of the story: fuck Windows Easy Transfer. Don't plan on using it if you have different OSs on your PCs.

Off to a follow-up VET appointment shortly, but should have a 40k related article up this evening.

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* Wait, why does your mom have a different network than your step-dad? Well this is a confusing situation, but the short answer is that my mom is still living 4 hours away in my home-town, while my step-dad is in the Chicago suburbs. Basically due to my mom being employed by the State government and hiring freezes across the board, she hasn't been able to find a position up here in spite of 3 years of trying. So for now, they commute back and forth on the weekends. Fucked up I know, but things are getting really weird on my dad's side of things. You should ask me about why I'm going home this weekend to see my teenage step-sister's bastard newborn baby and how my step-mom is the same age as my sister-in-law some time? There are many interesting stories there.
**Taking the "easy" out of data transfers since 2007.