Point and Curse

Next week, my wife and her sisters are going to gift their mother with a new PC. The PC was delivered to us yesterday so that we could do any configuration that was needed. It was pretty straightforward, for the most part -- time zone, language to use, that sort of thing. XP rocketed right up -- something to do with not having any programs to run on startup, I expect -- and then I looked at the desktop, and at the start menu.

My oh my.

Laden with Dell specials, and offers for dial up services, and a mixture of programs, some of which were obvious, some of which were not. A pointer to Notepad was in one folder, while a pointer to Wordpad was in another. Some Dell specials having to do with their multimedia offers were over here, while some stuff to do with Real Audio was over there.

System configuration took about fifteen minutes. Moving stuff around on the Start menu, so that it was logically grouped, took about half an hour. Much of that was identifying stuff that the intended recipient would likely never use, and moving it into a subfolder. Some of it was finding things the recipient would likely use -- Word Perfect, Wordpad, Notepad -- and putting them up front under a generic 'Writing Tools' folder.

Went from about twenty up-front folders to about six. Kind of makes me wonder why this configuration isn't drag-and-drop option, right at the menu. I can't imagine it would be that big a deal. But whatever -- its done.

Now we just have to figure out how to migrate the Outlook Express folders, the existing files on the old PC, and all of that. Should make for great fun, come Thanksgiving. I'll definitely be ready for that Italian pumpkin roll !