Part 2. Took the day off to pick up the machine. My friendly computer shop guy let me know he’d found a better keyboard/mouse bundle which saved me a few bucks, so the total cost was exactly $1200.
12:25. Just the basics plugged in — monitor, mouse, keyboard. Power it up. Certainly boots into XP fast. “27 days left for activation.”
Fiddle around with the defaults. The shop thoughtfully named the main account after my company name, but I want it to be Daniel… try renaming it, but the Docs & Settings subdirectory won’t rename. MyDocuments can be moved, but not its parent. So eventually I just create a fresh account for myself. Accounts for the kids too — no Administrator privileges for them, oh no.
14:10. Speakers plugged in and working. More playing about with settings (Hello Windows Classic theme). Tested a DVD. All works well though the eject button on the drive isn’t overly responsive. Hooray, the bundled PowerDVD happily grabs frames, something I sometimes want to do. The bundled Nero looks a bit light-on though… will want to be getting a real copy for DVD burning.
That’ll do for now, other stuff to do.
Mate, don’t rename the Administrator account, that can mess up a few things. Instead, create a new account, add it in the Administrators group, and disable the Administrator (for security purposes, if someone is trying to remotely log on as Administrator). You’ll have to customize everything for each account, from sounds to taskbar. It’s annoying, but it’s good. To backup an entire account’s stuff (settings and files), you can then use the User Profiles option in Control Panel – System. If you have an LCD display, XP’s ClearType can do miraculous things on the quality of text on the display; install the ClearType Tuner from Windows XP’s Power Toys.
Sorry, I should clarify. The box arrived with an Administrator account (which I left alone, apart from setting the password) and an account named after my company (eg Custard), which had admin privileges. Initially I tried to rename this, but the Docs+Settings directory didn’t move, so instead I created a Daniel account for myself to use.
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