Windows File and Settings Transfer (FAST) Wizard

So, despite being a system administrator for Windows systems for many years, I had never used the Windows File and Settings Transfer (FAST) Wizard to transfer files from one computer to another. I've always done it manually. Manual transfer takes more time and thought, but I believed it to be less error-prone.

My first experience with it has both good and bad points.

The Good

• I didn't have to babysit the thing
• You can use a folder on an external hard drive instead of a painfully slow serial cable
• The wizard compresses the data

The Bad

• The total amount of time was probably the same. Perhaps because the user had 70 GB of data
• All that compression takes time. I'd prefer a performance-increasing option to copy the data without compression. I had plenty of space on the HD.
• There's no option to turn off copying of applications. I didn't want to clutter up the new system with applications the user didn't actually need anymore. The user was in the Administrators group on the old system, but not on the new one. So, the wizard failed on copying a bunch of items to Program Files.

The Ugly

• Instead of just restoring the data from the folder I specified, it copied everything from the external hard drive onto the target system! I know I selected the folder containing the old system's image. So it ended up copying about 300 GB of data that had nothing to do with the user's original system (software installers, backups from other systems, etc.)

I'll probably use it again next time. Or perhaps I'll try the much more complicated User State Migration tool (USMT).

Word and Excel 2007 slow to open documents

One of my users had this apparently common problem -- opening either Word or Excel documents in Office 2007 was taking a long time (about 1 minute). Opening the document from within the application was fine.

This was the solution:
http://excel2007-slow-open-file.blogspot.com/

Basically, installing the "Analysis Toolpak" addin "fixed" the excel problem, but Word was still slow. So I installed "Lookup Wizard" (in Excel) and the Word problem was also fixed. Awesome, yes? I LOVE MICROSOFT!!!11!

Replace Cygwin command prompt with Puttycyg

I install Cygwin on every Windows machine that I have to use regularly. By default, Cygwin uses the Windows Command Prompt for its terminal. Gross!

I much prefer putty -- to the point that I would open putty and SSH to localhost, just so that I can use a real terminal!

With puttycyg, there's no need to SSH in. Donwload puttycyg and extract the ZIP. Then copy the two executables (putty.exe and cthelper.exe) into C:\cygwin (or wherever you have it installed).

Then, modify your cygwin.bat shortcut to run this target instead:

C:\cygwin\putty.exe -cygterm -

(yes that is a dash at the end!)