Americans spent the eight years of the Clinton administration becoming ever more computer literate, and it hasn’t been easy.
Back in 1993 when Bill Clinton was inaugurated and the Binary Beat column made its debut, a paltry 21 percent of Americans owned home computers. Today, 52 percent of all American households have at least one personal computer, and some estimates say that half of those homes have at least two computers in active use.
So you probably already know how frustrating it is to change the environment on your desktop once the new machine is out of the box and up and running.
Your old machine also became your old friend. It held all the data that you use in your daily life. Maybe this amounted to something as simple as an e-mail address book in America Online or maybe it was much more complex–a database of business contacts in Microsoft Outlook or some other personal information management program that has become a familiar and valuable part of your life.
As home computing has become ever more multimedia-oriented, this personally valuable stuff has grown to include whole folders of JPEG picture files of friends and family and maybe large numbers of MP3 music files downloaded from Internet sites.
As time passes, of course, the computer that holds all the stuff becomes obsolete. Its microprocessor is no longer fast enough to handle all the new software and Internet offerings.
While it is a great pleasure to replace one of these obsolete old friends with a hotshot newcomer, you quickly realize that you no longer have a lot of the comfortable old stuff that you got to know so well on the retired machine.
There are a number of ways to move things from an old computer to a new one.
You can buy products like Traveling Software’s new PC Synch or LapLink software packages that let users connect an old computer with a new one and then transfer files (www.laplink.com).
The latest LapLink products use special high-speed USB cables to allow transfers in Windows 98 and ME. Things are quite a bit rougher if you own a really old machine running Windows 95, because the only way that makes sense is to use software like LapLink to make connections through the parallel or serial ports. They can take a very long time to move large amounts of data.
Happily, most of us are at the stage where we are replacing a machine running Windows 98 with one running Windows ME, which means that we can make the transfers using built-in CD-RW drives.
I also often use an external USB CD-RW drive like the Backpack CD-RW by Micro Solutions (www.micro-solutions.com) to copy my digital treasures onto CDs that can easily be read by a CD ROM drive in any new PC or Macintosh.
Over the years I have found keeping a CD filled with my favorite stuff a tremendous comfort as I have moved from machine to machine, office to office and home to home. I call my CD “Object” and I carry it just about every where I go.
Object includes such treasures as my fonz.txt file, a plain-vanilla text file that I have maintained for nearly two decades that includes the names and addresses of all the people who have passed into and out of my life and all of the little bits and pieces of information like my various Internet passwords, bank personal information numbers and even a few scraps of poetry and song lyrics that this old pack rat cannot part with.
Object now holds a few megabytes of photographs and homemade movies of my grandkids, as well as backup files for the various programs that are big in my life. The Coates family budget spreadsheet also is there, along with a huge file that holds all of the information in my Microsoft Outlook database. This includes archives of this column and my Ask Jim Why column.
When I move from machine to machine, I just slip Object into the CD ROM drive and I feel right at home in a matter of minutes.
Object also contains installation software that I can use to quickly place many programs that I prefer on a new computer. In my case, this includes a smattering of shareware programs like Multimedia Xplorer, my favorite software for displaying photographs on computers.
There is one trick to keeping a collection like Object in one’s life, and that is creating a folder on the hard drive called Object and continually updating that folder and burning new CDs that hold it so that the Object you carry about is always fresh. Otherwise your Object might become as obsolete as an old computer.
Now that a CD-RW drive is a commonplace option on new computers, I hope word of my own particular and peculiar Object scheme would get around and save large numbers of otherwise sane computer buyers from the madness of starting all over from scratch every time planned obsolescence forces them into an upgrade.
That certainly is the Object of today’s column.
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/go/askjim or e-mail jcoates@rcnchicago.com. Snail mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 60611.
