Planetfurry BBS

Kellan Meig'h · Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 3:49 pm Post subject: One for the techno-mages . . .

Had to get a new laptop since the inverter was going out in my 5 yr old Dell. Troubles with xferring Mozilla profiles but a friend says he can help out with that plus 50 gigs of data to move.

What i need to know is, how do I make Windows 7 Home Premium act a little more like XP Pro? Start menu sucks right now and view of hdd in explorer not what I want to see.

Can this be done?

Halp!!

Posted (laboriously) from my Droid 2 Global.

Mr. Green

anthony · Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2012 4:35 pm Post subject:

If you everlearn how to, please tell me.
The Exploder sucks just as badly on the Enterprise version...
(Lots of wasted space, having to be 'on the computer page' to find the f! option to connect to a network drive... AAAARGH!)

Here's the most usefulthread I've found on the net:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/655-63-make-look

Other than that, I guess the advice is to just install XP...
(Note that if the computer came prepared for Win7, you may need ot enter the BIOS and change the SATA controller settings to emulate IDE instead of using AHCI for the WinXP setup to find the HDD)

hikaru · Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2012 9:07 pm Post subject:

Can't help you with making it look like XP because it just doesn't.

As for your Firefox profiles -- The new versions of FireFox have a "sync" option so that you can sync all of your settings, favorites, cookies, etc. between machines.

You might look at that.

Cheers!!

Kellan Meig'h · Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2012 10:50 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the replies, guys.

Anthony - as far as installing XP, that's a no-go. No XP drivers available for my Dell 17R. That would have been my 'perfect upgrade', too. 7 is okay, but I miss XP Pro sp3.

Hikaru - my friend gave me a 5-miute lesson on how to move identities that was flawless. Thunderbird up and running, all my FireFox shortcuts/prefs moved over.

LibreOffice installed, need to add Office 2003 (if I can) so I can get back to proofing.

By the way, my ISP (Comcast) had my outgoing email blocked by accident! So they say . . . Anyway, to all my fellow PF'ers; if your Comcast mail gets funky, call and make sure you haven't been blocked by accident or on purpose.

anthony · Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2012 8:44 am Post subject:

DELL doesn't really make drivers themselves, it would cost too much.
So all they have is repackaged drivers from the chip manufacturers.
and they often have XP drivers for them...
Sometimes, a manufacturer will change the ID used by windows for Plug'n Pray so that it no longer matches the IDs in the WinXP version .inf file, but as long as these files are all text, that's not really a problem, either.

Kellan Meig'h · Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2012 11:50 am Post subject:

Well, that information about the drivers is quite interesting! Thank you!

Maybe an XP 'uprade' is in my future!

Off to check this out.