At the end of yesterday I had a fully functioning laptop again having completely wiped it and done a fresh install. This process involved a trip into the office to join the machine to the domain and synchronise Outlook to my Exchange folders, all of which took an hour or so. One thing that this exercise has shown me is that installing the software is the easy part – anyone can double click an installer and get the files onto their machine – no, what is really challenging is getting right all the settings for all the programs.
As an example take Microsoft Outlook, I like the preview pane to be down the bottom but out of the box it is down the side. Also, again by default, when a message arrives you get a “bing”, an icon in the notification area, a pop-up with details of the sender and subject and finally, if the previous hadn’t alerted you to the fact that you might have an incoming email, the cursor also briefly changes. All great allowing you to personalise Outlook to just how you want it and over the years I have done precisely that. Problem is I have no idea of all the tweaks I have made and the same applies to countless other pieces of software and there seems to be no way of storing these setting and reapplying them – perhaps there is a gap in the market here?
I promise that this is the last post on this matter!