Ask DACS
November 2009

Moderated and reported by Jim Scheef.

Ask DACS is a Question and Answer session before the main presentation at the monthly General Meeting. We solicit questions from the floor and then answers from other audience members. My role as moderator is to try to guide the discussion to a likely solution to the problem.

Q – A while back I set up the “Windows Spell Checker” on WinXP with Word 2003 so that it would check spelling when filling in forms in Internet Explorer. Now I would like to do the same on another machine but do not remember how.

A – After some stumbling, it appears that there are several add-ins or extensions that perform this magic. One is at http://ie7pro.com/spell-checker.html. There are many others that are found by searching for ‘spell checking in IE’. A member noted that some of the browser toolbars provide spell checking. Another member said that most browsers other than IE provide spell checking by default. This is the case in Firefox 3.5 (which I use), Opera and probably others.

Q – Has anyone migrated from WinXP directly to Windows 7? How did you do it and how well did it work?

A – There is no way to upgrade WinXP “in place” directly to Win7. In my opinion this is a penalty from Microsoft for skipping Vista. The quasi-official way is to copy your files to an external drive, install Win7 which wipes out everything on the internal drive and then reinstall all of your applications and copy back your data files. This brute force technique will not migrate registry settings or email and similar data that is not stored in the My Documents folder.

Searching after the meeting, I found three official Microsoft methods. A video on how to use the User State Migration Tool (USMT) is at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd671583.aspx. Another tool is the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) which is at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ee410767.aspx. Both of these copy user settings to a temporary file that must be saved on external media (CD or external hard drive) and then migrates all this to the new Windows installation which can be on the same or a different computer. The MDT is claimed to migrate “user data, custom applications and drivers”. Long ago I tried to use the USMT to migrate from one Win2k domain to another Win2k domain and this failed. The “consumer” solution is Easy Transfer.

PC Mover is a third-party tool that claims to be “The Easiest Way to Move to Windows 7!” One member said he plans to try it so we should follow up on this question at the December meeting.

Hopefully, these newer tools are easier to use. Note that if there more than one user on a machine, the USMT must be run for each user. Good luck.

Because this process is fraught with trouble, there are many tutorials on how to make the jump. I suggest that you read several to get an idea of what is involved and be sure to watch the Microsoft videos.

Another technique is to convert your entire current Windows installation to a virtual machine so that you can run it under Win7. One tool to do this is Acronis® True Image Home 2010 that can backup and disk to a VHD (virtual hard drive) file. This file can then be opened and run under Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. This does nothing to migrate you to Win7 but does preserve all of your old installation and makes it available under Win7. Naturally this requires some hard drive space.

Q – What experience have others had with device drivers under Window 7?

A – One member stated that Win7 has been able to use most drivers compatible with Vista. Where he has had trouble is with external print servers that network-enable regular parallel and USB printers. Another member reminded us about the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor (also on the Win7 install DVD), a Microsoft tool that checks the applications and drivers on your current machine for Win7 compatibility. This would seem to be an obvious first step. Many people reported trouble with video drivers.

Q – How can I record streaming video for playback later?

A – The software required to do this depends on the format of the incoming video. One member suggested CamStudio, an open source program that claims to be “able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).” Another member recommended Format Factory, an open source program to convert video file formats (but does not record streaming video).

Q – I bought an external hard drive that comes with software to do “continuous file backups”. The software significantly slows down my computer. The drive is a Western Digital MyBook USB/Firewire external hard drive. Has anyone used one of these and how well does it work?

A – [Unfortunately at the end of the question, the recorder ran out of space so I can only report what I recall from memory.] The discussion centered on other backup software solutions that perform scheduled backups rather than continuous. This would eliminate the Western Digital software that is slowing down the computer. There are many such programs including the Acronis software mentioned above.

Questions for the upcoming meeting can be emailed to askdacs@dacs.org.

Disclaimer: Ask DACS questions come from members by email or from the audience attending the general meeting. Answers are suggestions offered by meeting attendees and represent a consensus of those responding. DACS offers no warrantee as to the correctness of the answers and anyone following these suggestions or answers does so at their own risk. In other words, we could be totally wrong!