OT Windows 7 and Email Client

[Tim Lamb]

err... why?

I too have no master disc. Had one been supplied with the m/c it would not have service pack 2 or 3.

regards

[John Rumm]

The solution to that is to make a "slipstreamed"[1] disc which rolls up all the updates onto an install image. Saves hours of patching should you ever need to do a fresh install. (which I had to do for the second time in about 11 years on one of my machines recently... pah, all these people who can't keep it up for more than a few weeks at a time eh ;-)

[1] nlite is a very handy package for this - point it at a folder with the install CD content in it, and another with the required service packs etc and it will create the new slipstreamed CD for you in one hit.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Total tripe.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

After problems with FF, I installed Opera. I'd used Opera for years, until version 8, then forgot about it. Apart from some initial getting used to it, it was fine. Apart from one killer issue - I have the text size set larger than default and this screws up many pages; I suspect the pages in question are probably written with IE in mind, which was always a pita.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Best description of windows XP yet.

keep em coming.

[Rick Hughes]

On 01/06/2012 12:13, DavidM wrote: where I'd appreciate and views and/or recommendations:

I have 32bit Ultimate ... all of my programs worked fine ... W7 validation tool can be run in advance to check them for you.

I moved to W7 in Jan .... same issue. So I installed Mozilla Thunderbird .... free and much better that OE Includes a Newsreader (using it for this) ,... also used import tool to import all my OE folders & files ... although you can just cut & paste.

I also swapped to Mozilla Firefox and dumped IE ... much faster and more reliable.

[DavidM]

Thanks again for all the replies.

Had a quick look at Thunderbird and it seems to do the job quite well. Will just have to teach the Mrs how to use it! Import from OE looks good as well. I guess I need to install TB on the old XP machine to import all the emails/folders, then copy the database over to the new machine with TB (or do I need to export in some intermediate format then import on the new machine?).

I'll probably go for W7 Professional, as I still need the XP compatibility for a couple of other programs.

Any "gotchas" in XP Prof that I should be aware of, or is it all fairly straightforward, bearing in mind I'm not upgrading an exisiting XP system but buying a new system with W7 pre installed?

[The Natural Philosopher]

DavidM wrote: I guess I need to install TB on the old XP machine to

No. The format of the folder is the same.

Finding where it lives is less than trivial - certainly on Linux.

And is configurable as well.

>

[John Rumm]

Yup, that will work.

Install a fresh copy on the new machine. Then on the old one open a my computer window, make sure the address bar is enabled, and type %appdata% in to the address bar. That will take you to the hidden folder that contains your various application's data.

look for the thunderbird folder, in which will be a profiles folder, in which is a oddly named folder called nnnnnnnn.default (where the "nnn"s will be random). Copy the entire content of that folder to a flash drive (or share it on your network).

Now on the new machine, make sure thunderbird is not running. Now do the same %appdata% trick to get to the right folder on Win7 (its different from XP), and dump the content from the old machine into the similarly named folder on the win7 machine.

Since you will be reinstalling your apps on the virtual machine, you may find some which require activation (office etc) could whinge if you have reinstalled them recently on the old machine - however that can usually be worked around.