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Only a geek backs up his (or her!) data, right? So I must be an uber-geek, because I have two levels of data backup going on: backup to external media, and CVS. Both are pretty easy to get running on your Windows machine, and everybody should do them!
Main thing — and what you should definitely do, because it’s pretty cheap and easy — is back up to external media. This could be a USB, USB2 or FireWire hard drive you buy, it could be a CD, or it could be one of those Internet backup people (in fact, if it’s really essential data, you should probably back it up to external media you have at home and one of those Internet backup companies, so that the data’s still fine if your house burns down). CDs are incredibly cheap, but can’t be reused much (even the CD-RW kind), and, these days, prices are down to about $1/GB for those external drives.
I had an old external FireWire drive left over from when I put a larger hard drive in my old PowerBook, so I just kept that drive and bought a FireWire card for my new Dell Latitude. Now I back up my data weekly to that drive; my Quicken file, all my schoolwork, photos, etc. (my music gets backed up to my iPod). I use a simple and cheap little app called “Argentum Backup”:http://www.argentuma.com/backup.html. Substantially free of many of the whiz-bang features you find out there, Argentum is really easy-to-use and doesn’t have many requirements at all — simple and stays out of your way is my kind of program! Just select the folders you want to back up and let the thing go. Since it just zips everything up, to save space, you don’t even need to go through some “complicated, time-consuming process”:http://www.dantz.com/ to restore a lost or broken file. Oh, but do turn off Norton’s “scan inside archives” feature when you’re restoring files, unless you have plenty of time to waste waiting and waiting. This system came in handy just last week, when a broken sync between Outlook and my cell phone resulted in some lost contacts — I just grabbed the old Outlook .pst from the previous week and imported the missing contacts back into Outlook.
The second backup method I use is “CVS”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System. This is a simple tool, built for software developers, that lets you keep multiple versions of a single file at the same time (it offers a lot more features than that, but this is what it’s useful for in this context). CVS works in a pretty easy way; you tell it what files it should track, and, each time you save changes to a file, you tell CVS that you updated the file — you can even leave a note in CVS specifying what changes were made. If, at a later point, you want to go back to an earlier version, you just ask CVS to tell you what versions of the file you have and you can restore any one or several of those files. This came in particularly handy earlier this week when I wanted to play around with some changes to a presentation my group was making. I checked the presentation into CVS, made a series of changes, looked at them, decided that the end product didn’t work, and restored an earlier version (with some changes) from CVS. The notes in CVS even told me which earlier version I wanted to go back to! All of this without various meaningless “presentation.doc” “presentation2.doc” “presentation3.doc” files. I use a great GUI for CVS called “TortoiseCVS”:http://www.tortoisecvs.org/, which integrates CVS into Windows Explorer in a really seamless way.
So, all this — yes, it’s geeky, but it’s useful, too, and it requires very little effort. Here’s how to do it:
# Take a look at your files, and imagine what you’d cry over if you lost, and what you’d have to recreate straight away
# Now you’ve got a good idea of what files you need to back up. So, how often do those files change? For instance, you may add new photos every month when you go on vacation, but never touch your old photos.
# For files that change only once, just back up to CD when you put them on the computer — almost everybody has a CD burner on their computer these days.
# For files that change more often — your novel, your Quicken file — a CD can be inconvenient. Also, CD-RWs are inexpensive, and may have a “limited life”:http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15800263&pgno=1. For stuff you’re backing up more regularly, an external hard drive may be more useful. You can just plug in and back up every day.
# Now make a plan. How often will you back up? Weekly may be OK.
# Now lay in your supplies. Do you need to buy a new external drive? A spindle of CDs? Make sure your backup materials are on hand.
# If you’re just backing up a few files, you can copy them over by hand. If not, you might need to buy a program to do it. I recommend one above.
# Now run your first backup.
# If you want to run CVS, install it now.
# Now check all your files into CVS and commit the initial version.
# You’re pretty safe!
[Specific instructions added in response to post below]

If you’re like me, you like to automatically have your e-mail and events and even contacts and tasks colored in Outlook. It just makes sense to have everything clear to you as soon as you glance at your inbox or your calendar; with everything colored, just a quick look lets you know what’s important, what’s trivial, and what’s urgent.
Outlook hides its color-coding ability. You might think that you apply colors through filters, but the colors are not, in fact, attributes of messages, appointments, etc; they’re merely temporary filters applied to messages. This is nice because it’s easy to re-color things, but it does mean that the controls for coloring are not where you’d expect, and that you can change your filter and accidentally lose your colors.
In Outlook, whatever task it is you’re doing, you can select “Organize” from the “Tools” menu. Click on “Using Views” (not “Using Colors”, as you might expect), then click “Customize Current View”. Click “Automatic Formatting”, “Add” a rule. You get color options here, and all the rules too. What you think of as filter rules are behind the “Advanced” tab.
To hide completed tasks, you need to click on “Filters” rather than “Automatic Formatting”, and click the “Advanced” tab. From “Frequently-used fields” choose “Complete” and set it “equal to” “No”. Easy as pie, right? Just don’t forget, the interface makes it incredibly difficult to add another filter category, so I hope you like this one!
The ability to color-code almost everything is built into a lot of applications; Microsoft Entourage, BareBones Mailsmith, Apple Mail, Apple iCal… wait, these are all Mac applications! Is it, maybe, that Mac users expect to be able to organize their items in a way that allows rapid visual perusal? My non-scientific investigation supports that assertion: my PC-loving power-user friend, who teases me incessantly about my switching stories here, looked at me like I’d just asked “who wants to drive rusty nails into their flesh?” when I mentioned to her that I was color-coding everything in Outlook; a Mac-loving roommate of a friend looked at me like I’d just asked “who likes to breathe air?” when I told him the same story. So, apparently, us Mac people like color.
So, for us Mac people, Outlook’s color-coding capabilities, to put it kindly, suck. The available colors are pre-set, and the same colors aren’t available in mail, calendar and contacts, so you can’t have categories correspond acrossthe different tasks for which you use Outlook. Also, the interface to do the coloring is obtuse and well-hidden. It’s sad, sad. But it works, and it looks like it’ll be good enough.
Oh, and that show and hide tasks thing? Yeah, that’s a menu item in Entourage. Microsoft could use to learn from itself.

It’s harder than one thinks it might be to import your Macintosh Quicken file into your new Windows version of Quicken. Among other challenges, Quicken support uses the word “convert” rather than “import”, which makes it harder to search for the right article.
There is, however, a “right article”:http://search.intuit.com/KCS/viewdocument.do?action=6&searchMode=GuidedSearch&docID=PQ.bb310&externalID=&sliceID=&dialogID=7942372&iterationID=1&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.intuit.com%2fsupport%2fquicken%2f2005%2fmac%2f5198.html%3Fsource=2&docName=Converting+data+from+Quicken+for+Mac+to+Quicken+for+Windows&sourceKmap=&viewFrom=Main&docDate=%3CDocDate%3E%3CY%3E%3C/Y%3E%3CM%3E%3C/M%3E%3CD%3E%3C/D%3E%3C/DocDate%3E&locale=, and it gives good advice. The export process is, briefly, as follows:
# Set your Mac to use four-digit years, and restart
# Un-hide any hidden accounts
# Explort a .qif file from your Mac
# Import the .qif file into your PC, confirming a lot of transactions
# Re-enter all scheduled transactions, because they will have been lost
This will get you all your info, more-or-less whole. Step 1 is surprising; I would have expected that Quicken would have used 4-digit dates internally, at least, for additional precision. If you fail to carry out step 1, as I did the first time, all of your imported transactions from, say, 2004 will be listed as having taken place in 1904. Not convenient, and, again, surprising; a basic sanity check of dates on import would safely eliminate transactions from 100 years ago, I would think.
This list is not complete, however, at least not if you’re like me. When I went to reconcile one of my accounts — one that had always been reconciled successfully on the Mac — I ended up being off by $35,000. Nothing I could do would convince Quicken to use the right starting balance so that the reconciliation could come out correct. I ended up letting Quicken enter an adjustment; I reconciled the next month, too (I’d taken off a month, you know, vacation), and that turned out fine, so I just deleted the adjustment and the trial balance turned out fine. We’ll see if that holds up. If it doesn’t, my advice for importing from Quicken Mac into Quicken Windows will be: use Microsoft Money.

So I love my Dell “Dimension”:http://www.epinions.com/pr-Dell_Latitude_D600_MPN-D600SAPP_PC_Notebook/display_~reviews “D600″:http://www.epinions.com/pr-Dell_Latitude_D600_221-2640_PC_Notebook/display_~reviews. It’s reasonably fast, I actually like the keyboard, I haven’t had any trouble with the trackpoint (the complaints sound like people who didn’t realize that many Windows laptops have their trackpoints set to scroll and double-click and stuff like that with taps on the touchpad), I got a larger, slower, cooler hard drive so the wrist rest is never uncomfortable. I’m a little disappointed with the LCD, it’s only as good as my almost 5-year-old Powerbook’s was.
So the laptop itself is fine. The problem is the TrueMobile 2300 wireless router I got as an afterthought.
I figured, why not upgrade from my 4-year-old Apple Airport base station to something with 802.11g (speed) and 128-bit WEP or WPA (security)? The “TrueMobile 2300″:http://www.epinions.com/pr-Dell_TrueMobile_2300_Wireless_Broadband_Router_TM23001/display_~reviews was just $80-something. A good buy. If it worked. Of course, it didn’t.
The connection was fast and secure, and the router was easy-to-manage. Unfortunately, the connection dropped all the time. One friend had to turn off the sound on their computer because I was playing a fricking symphony, I was dropping off and logging onto instant messenger so often. I couldn’t do e-mail, research, or update this blog, ’cause I couldn’t stay on for more than a few minutes.
I tried to fix it myself, changing the router’s setup in various ways, to no avail. So I called Dell tech support. They were nice, and I was nice back. I explained how I’d approached the problem systematically, explained my setup, explained my lack of 2.4GHz phones, explained how the Airport base station had worked fine in exactly the same spot for eight months. Two seperate Dell techs worked on the unit, and sent me out a replacement. They were nice enough to send the replacement before I returned the broken unit, which was very convenient. Sadly I was not aware of the darker strategy which underlay the techs’ cooperative and helpful approach to fixing my three-week-old TrueMobile 2300.
The replacement worked no better. Since the unit, and probably the design, is faulty, and I got two that didn’t work, I didn’t want to keep my TrueMobile 2300. I just wanted to send it back. But the kindly techs spent an entire phone call trying to get the thing to work. They were so nice and knowledgeable, I was happy to give it until the next day.
But the next day was no better. I set up the Airport again to double-check that I wasn’t missing some environmental source of interference, and to confirm that it wasn’t the TrueMoble 1300 card in my Latitude D600 that was the problem. But everything works with the Airport, so clearly the problem is the TrueMobile 2300 router. So I called Customer Service; with two bad units, I should simply be able to return the product, right?
Wrong. See, while I was waiting for the first replacement, my 21-day return deadline passed. After that, nothing can get the unit returned. Now I have a third new TrueMobile 2300, and a nasty letter telling me I need to send back the broken one they last sent me. It’s an $80 product. What’s worth fighting over? All I can think now is how much trouble I had over this $2000+ purchase because of this $80 item. I’ll certainly never buy another Dell peripheral; taking back the broken item would’ve been no skin off anybody’s stiff upper lip. Ah well, I’m probably going back to a Mac in a few years anyway.

Switching from a Mac to a PC, I needed to move my iTunes library from my old Mac to my new PC, without losing any of my playlists, ratings, etc. From my inital Google searches, it looked hard. Moving my iTunes library from my Mac to my PC didn’t turn out to be bad at all, modulo my initial long walks down wrong paths.
It’s not possible to just move your music files from your Mac to your PC; iTunes won’t know where they are. The good part is, iTunes seems to use more than just an absolute path to the music file to identify said file for your library; this makes the job a *lot* easier. The problem is, whatever iTunes seems to use besides the path only seems to work when you’ve let iTunes organize your library for you.
The first step is, therefore, to let iTunes organize your music for you. There’s no particular reason not to do that, although lots of people don’t; I don’t remember the last time I used the file browser, rather than iTunes’s interface, and I bet you don’t either. Go to iTunes>Preferences, click on the Advanced tab, choose a music location you’re comfortable with, check next to “Keep iTunes Music Folder organized”. Then go to Advanced>Consolidate Library. iTunes will take quite a while to put all of your music in one single, well-organized folder.
The next step is to install iTunes on your PC. After installing, run it once. This will put all of the folders and files in their default locations, which will come in handy when you replace them. Quit iTunes before moving to the next step.
Now copy your iTunes Music folder from your Mac to your PC, placing your music in your default “iTunes Music” folder in your “iTunes” folder in your “My Music” folder that iTunes created for you the first time you ran it. Also copy your “iTunes 4 Music Library” file.
iTunes will also have created “iTunes 4 Music Library.itl” and “iTunes Music Library.xml”. It’s not clear what the .xml file does. Ignore it. Delete “iTunes 4 Music Library.itl” and replace it with your “iTunes 4 Music Library” from your Mac, adding the “.itl” extension by hand. Now launch iTunes again. Presto! You’ve moved your iTunes library from your Mac to your PC.

I’ve kept all of my e-mail since 1995, and I don’t have any intention of losing it just because I switch from a Mac to a PC. I needed to export my mail from Mailsmith and import it into Outlook. The process I came up with acutally works to import mbox files into Outlook from any program that can make .mbox files — including Netscape Mail, Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Pine, and, well, probably anything that runs on *nix systems.
Now, “some folks”:http://fkeeps.com/fmorph/fmindex.htm will want you to give them money to import your mail from an .mbox file into Outlook. My procedure has the positive side effect of being free.
Since I was using Mailsmith, and not something like Netscape Mail or Apple Mail that uses mbox files as its native store, I had to export everything first. Fortunately, BareBones provides “a simple Applescript to do just that”:http://www.barebones.com/support/technotes/tech_import_export.shtml.
Outlook won’t just go and import mbox files. It does import from Eudora, which uses .mbx files with associated .idx files that keep some sort of an index of something (I am too lazy to look inside). Eudora does import straight .mbox files and will generate .idx files for them. So, the “Light or Sponsored version of Eudora”:http://eudora.com/products/eudora/download/ is your friend, and our middle step in this process.
Eudora is very liberal in what it considers its mailstore; specifically, it will consider any .mbx file you put in your user folder as its mailstore and display it as a folder. To import all of your mbox files into Eudora, you just need to rename them with a .mbx file extension. You can “use the shell to do this”:http://www.secretaboutbox.com/site/articles/extensions.php.
Once Eudora’s open, you’ll need to open and rename each folder to make sure that Eudora builds an .idx file for it. Sadly (since I have 90-some folders), I couldn’t figure out a way to automate this. Probably would be a quick job with some Visual Basic and COM, if you already knew Eudora’s object model.
Now that Eudora has built an .idx file for each folder, Outlook will be more than happy to import all of your mail. For free!

Why must everything take a few extra steps in Windows? Why must everything be hidden behind thre menu options or only accessable with a right-click? Why can’t things just be put nicely, cleanly, in one place? Why must everything important be controlled by an eensy-weensy icon in the bottom left of my screen? Why, why, why?
Yes, I’m talking to you, print server that requires me to change every single networking option on my computer to set you up. And you, shitty wireless router from Dell, you don’t help at all, dropping the signal all the time, requiring a hard reset. Why, my four-year-old Apple Airport gave me a stronger signal.
This is just a bitch for today. Tomorrow: “useful tips”:http://daringfireball.net/2004/05/writing_for_google.

So far, I actually like my new system pretty well. I’m configuring everything just the way I like it, and am becoming comfortable with Windows XP. Then Apple comes along and announces “Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/ and makes me jealous.
Tiger offers almost everything I am looking for in an operating system. In addition to all of the “wonderful things in OS X 10.2 Jaguar”:http://juniorbird.com/archives/000212.html, Tiger adds clever things like easy-to-hide little utilities, pervasive and fast search, real accessability, and an easy way to make automatic, repeatable tasks. Stuff that real people who really want to use their computers *better* can take advantage of. Stuff that Microsoft has promised for Longhorn, in 2006 or 2007.
So, I’ll be jealous for a bit. I’m sure that, when I start using the PC-only applications promised in my orientation packet, and start easily collaborating with my classmates, I’ll appreciate this PC.
Until then, oh yes, I’ll be plenty jealous.