- Before we start this week's main topic, I have to report on the experience of one of my clients this week. He has a relatively new Dell PC under warranty that required a re-installation of Windows. I did comment last week that Dell service seems to be slipping a bit, but his experience was excellent. They performed the work (mostly) online and had him up and running very quickly. What really impressed me was that they knew the backup program I had set up for my client and effectively used it to take another backup before the process and restore the data afterwards. If this is a consistent example of Dell's current service, perhaps the tide has turned.
- The Vista SP1 (Service Pack 1) is out for beta test, so it hopefully won't be long before it is released. I hope it fixes some of the issues my clients have been seeing.
- Microsoft's new Vista OS has fixed an ongoing problem that we all had in XP, but I am not sure I am entirely comfortable with the fix.
The problem was the use of the folder on your C: drive called "Program Files". This folder is where programs are supposed to install their files (i.e. the files that make up the program itself), but not the user's data files. Thus you should not have to backup "Program Files" - in the case of a crash you would just reinstall the programs. Data files were supposed to be in the "Documents and Settings" structure, which has a unique folder inside it for each logon. Most programs adhere to this, but there were some glaring exceptions, including some versions of Quicken.
To me, the primary issue with doing this is the age-old problem of knowing where your data is. You can't backup your data if you can't find it. If you have, for example, all your stuff under "My Documents" then you just have to backup that one folder and you are done. But if you have data in "Program Files", you can't backup the whole thing as it is too big. So you then have to start backing up individual folders within "Program Files" - an inaccurate chore. Of course in almost all cases you can manually move the data to where it belongs, but few people do that.
The problem is that the target of malicious spyware or viruses that try to invade your PC is the "Program Files" folder because that is where your programs reside so they can infect them. In Vista, MS has tried to minimize this problem by making the "Program Files" folder protected - programs can't write to it without permission. In general, a good thing.
But what about those older programs that still do in fact write data there? In order to keep them working, MS has invented something new called "Virtual Store". This is a folder on your C: drive (usually in c:\Users\ This seems to work fairly well and in fact I didn't notice or know about it until recently. But the problem is that I want to know where my data really is for backup or migration purposes. Tricks like this which create wormholes (see your local Science Fiction fan for an explanation) on your hard drive and you are never really sure what is really where.
I suppose that as an official control freak this bothers me more than some people, but it is something I thought you should be aware of.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)