My name is Frank and I am a PC

A message from the upgrade bunker…

I’m heads down into my third and final day of upgrading this PC from Windows XP Media Edition (SP3) to Windows 7 Ultimate. It’s about a three hour job and–yes–I am a terrible procrastinator and foot-dragger with the flighty attention span of a carefree chickadee on a summer day, so let that disclaimer explain why I–a seasoned systems professional–continue to dither around and about a project that should have been done on a Monday morning.

I blame it on twitter. General Motors International Operations has a “social media” team. Who knew? The news makes me feel like someone slapped me in the face with a trout. It only took fifteen or twenty years to get the message out to the corporate culture that the mediating influence of this internex thing is central to global communications. Next thing you know the corporate marketing types are cluttering up the twitter stream.

GM Social Media Team member, Gluten Free, chocolate loving, shoe crazed, newlywed twenty something. Follow my global travels: annalisabluhm.posterous.com

Must one not explore the nuanced tweets of such a person? Must one not follow her on her gluten-free gastronomic adventure in the far east?

It’s easy to lose track of the data migration path from XP to the external hard drive and back to the local drive after Windows 7 Ultimate is installed. Windows 7 Ultimate sports a feature called “aero.” Ford has a van named Aerostar. I wonder if Ford marketing is as twitterfied as GM International Operations. One way to find out…

Bada bing! Hey there! ScottMonty is using twitter.

Head of social media at Ford Motor Company, husband, dad, host of http://ihearofsherlock.com, and a generally nice guy. Formerly from Boston.

Yes, Scott Monty is using twitter, has been for the last three years. In that time he’s pumped out over 18,000 tweets, befriended over 32,000 people and attracted almost 38,000 followers.

Fascinating.

This dreck can keep you thrashing about in your own head and prevent any work from getting done. So, where was I?

So how hard could it be? Download the operating system as an ISO file. Burn it to a DVD. (Download Imgburn to make it easy.) Run Windows Easy Transfer to move files and settings to an external drive. Scramble around to find the media for all the applications that the upgrade will blow away. Now do the installation and pray that it makes the rootkit go away.

Rootkit? Oh. I didn’t tell you. Malware forced my upgrade to Windows 7. I had a rootkit hiding somewhere, a nasty piece of code that randomly redirected my searches to searchfindsite.

Anyway, the whole upgrade process was easy as pie. The file transfers worked fine. The reinstallation of programs, while not easy as pie nor even a piece of cake, went fine. Windows loads updates and patches all the time, and eventually I hope to be caught up. Every day in every way I am getting PCier and PCier. Seriously, the OS is so feature rich I’ll have to study to take advantage of it. I’ll also be studying MS Office 2024. Since Office 2024 is out there in the hands of brave early adopters and since I didn’t really pay all that much attention to the bells and whistle on Office 2024, I figure getting up to speed on 2024 will prepare me for 2024. Really…

I think I’ll upgrade the Vaio next, and then maybe the netbook. Glutton for punishment? Masochist? Not really. It’s just that the tool set is ever changing and it pay$ to keep up.