Been a slightly stressful day and a 1/2 at work for me, had to set up some PC’s in the office and transfer data onto them from the PC’s there replacing, now this may not seem very stressful I know, but when you spend 1/2 day trying to figure out why you cant load an operating system onto the PC’s even though you’ve contacted Dell’s Mumbai Support Centre 8 times and each of those 8 times they tell you that these instructions will resolve the matter and 8 times they don’t your bound to be a little stressed.

After finally giving up on getting any sort of help from Dell I eventually found a response on a forum detailing what was causing the problem (it was the SATA settings for the hard-drive in system setup) and resolving it I finally got round to installing Win XP on the 1st of the PC’s.

So I’ve the got the OS installed now all I need to do is back up the PST file from the PC its replacing, copy any files that the user has stored on their PC onto the Server and than replace the PC, copy all the data back onto the new PC, import the PST file into Outlook and Bob’s ya uncle so to speak . . . well again nothings ever easy. First off the PST file is nearly 4 Gig in size (seems the users kept every single email they’ve sent/received in the past 3-4 years, so after 40-60 min’s of exporting I finally start to look for the data files that the user wants me to copy across to the new PC, kindly enough the user has put them all into a folder on his desktop to make it easier for me, so I copy the move the PST file I’ve just exported and drop it inside the folder and prepare to copy it onto the server . . thinking that its not going to take real long, its 4 Gig file and some word/excel documents, surely that won’t take long, how wrong could I be, seems that the copying over the networks going to take 2hrs ! Upon investigating the folder with all the docs in he wants me to copy I find there’s 11 Gig of data in there even before I add the 4 Gig PST file (yep 15 Gig of data), this explains the long time to copy across the network.

So thats why its been a stressful  day and a 1/2 thus far, I’ve not even finished yet either, still got a shed load of windows updates to download and install yet and I’ve yet to copy the data back onto the users new PC . . oh joy.

You know whats really annoying about the whole thing . . . this could have been so much easier, for a start we have a server that gets backed up every night that this person could have been storing their 11 Gig of data on, which if they had would have saved me a good few hours of work, they could have even maybe occasionally gone through there emails and deleted any they don’t need anymore (we keep a backup of incoming/outgoing emails in MailMarshal so people can delete emails, but nobody does).  If they’d just done one of these it would have saved me at least a couple of hours work, but alas no such luck