[pchelpers] Re: [pchelpers]Callwave/sound

Hi Ellen,

Wednesday, December 31, 2003, 3:27:31 PM, you wrote:

EM> I'll find it one day.... I'm a little leery of a re-install....

Why?

The newer versions of Windows are more re-insall friendly; it's
unusual nowadays to have significant problems with a reinstall. If it
asks for a driver, you can usually point it at C:\WINDOWS\INF, to grab
the driver that the old install of Windows already has. If it asks for
a *.DLL file, you can usually point it at C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM or
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32. And so forth.


EM> Another possibility (which would probably fix the problem in
EM> question), is to rename both the profile itself (I think it's
EM> under C:\WINDOWS\PROFILES) and the *.PWL file, create a new
EM> profile with the same name as the original, copy the *.PWL file
EM> over, copy the desktop and menu over from the old profile to the
EM> new profile. If doesn't work, delete the new profile and copy the
EM> old one back and copy back the old *.PWL file. I don't have a
EM> win98 machine handy so I can't tell how feasible it is, but might
EM> be worth trying. It wouldn't work with Win2K/XP, though, since
EM> each profile has a unique ID by which it is identified, and that
EM> ID can't be set manually.

As it happens, I did this just last night, while helping one of my
co-workers with one of his customers. It was a pair of WinXP systems,
one of which had problems and had data, and the other of which was a
loaner and needed the data copied to it. I created a new user on the
loaner with the same name as on the problem compuer, then logged onto
that profile (to make sure that it was set up properly), logged back
off, copied the profile over from the problem computer (the entire
folder within the Documents and Settings colder), logged back on as
tha user, and it worked. The email passwords were gone, but they were
easily retrieved in a couple of seconds from the problem computer with
a password revealer. If there had been any certificates, they would
have been lost, and would have had to decrypt any encrypted files
first.

I hadn't really expected it to work; I had tried it just in case.
Knowing that it works gives me some ideas for setting up user accounts
on new systems; set up a user account on a model system, save the
profile to CD, and when I need a new, pre-configured profile, I just
create the new user, log on, log off, copy the profile from the CD,
and then rename the user as desired.

--Scott.


Regards, John Durham (list moderator) <http://modecideas.com/contact.html?sig>
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