By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Hurricanes and Computers Without a change from the predicted course for Hurricane Charley, it is not clear that I would now be typing this column at my computer in a room under a giant oak limb in a house about 600 feet from the Bay in Tampa. First, it is not clear that the room would still be of use after what I saw oak trees did to homes in Hardee and DeSoto Counties south of here. Second, even if my room had been spared, I am not sure we would have electricity, phone service or cable service yet. There are so many more houses in the Tampa Bay area than in the area hit by the storm, and in my part of Tampa, at least, we have almost total tree cover. The power lines would not have stood a chance. I can see it taking more than just a couple of weeks to get power back to everyone.

So what does all this hurricane stuff have to do with computers? Well, if you don’t plan ahead you may not have any computers or any of your data after a storm. And even if your computer survives the storm, you most likely won’t have any electricity to power it. Even if, as I, you have an electrical generator to provide temporary power, you most likely won’t have a phone line or cable connection that works so as to go on the Internet. Of course, if you don’t have a home left, what happened to your computer and data may not be of great consequence to you. That notwithstanding, let me relate what I did to prepare as the storm bore down on Tampa.

Omitting what we did to secure our home in general, here is what I did as regarding my computers. First, I backed up to CD all my data files and photos files that I had not already backed up. I keep fairly up-to-date on backups, so that was not a very big chore. If I had had to start from scratch, it would have been a very big problem, since the photos alone comprise over 50 GB. Then I made backups of the websites I manage and all of my programming files for Visual Basic, Delphi and Visual Studio. Other data that needed backing up were for programs like Quicken, Family Tree Maker, Access, Word, Excel--all the usual suspects.

Once I had my backup data on CDs or DVDs, I put them in a different place from where the computers reside. Of course, it would have been better to store them off site. And for a small amount of data, if desired, I could have uploaded it to some of the many servers for websites I have access to. All of those servers are outside Florida.

The final thing for me to do as regards computer preparation for the storm was to get the two computers and their associated printers and scanners in the first floor room under the giant oak limb moved to another location in the house. I decided to wait until a couple hours before landfall to do this, since there was always the possibility that the hurricane would choose other victims. And it did. Our good luck in Tampa was other Floridians’ bad luck.

Moving Data to a New Computer I assisted a relative recently in purchasing a new Compaq desktop computer. It is a beauty with Windows XP Professional, one GB RAM, 250 GB hard drive, 3.2 MHz Intel Hyper Threaded processor and a 17” flat panel display. Much more computer than she really needs, but she keeps computers for a long time, and who knows what she will need six years from now. Besides, it is the computer I would have ordered for myself.

Knowing that she would want to get all her data, email messages and other such things copied from the old to the new, I decided the best thing to do was buy a wireless router for her, and I found a real good buy on a Netgear WGR614 54 Mbps at CompUSA. The plan was to connect the new and old desktop computers to the router with cables and transfer her data over the network connection. Of course, that could just as well be done with a crossover cable or with a cheaper, non-wireless router. Ah, but the wireless router would also allow me to connect to the network with my notebook computer when I visited. That way I could tap into her broadband connection, and we could easily exchange the occasional file we sometimes share. Finally, with all the rebates, the wireless router was as cheap as a regular router.

With the old computer now connected to the router and configured to share its files, I tested the file sharing with my laptop computer and left her printed instructions on how to set up her new compute when it arrived. I would help her with the new printer and retrieving any files she couldn’t find when I next returned.

By the way, the old computer used Windows 98, so I simply shared the C drive and made it password protected. I also enabled WEP on the router so that a casual passerby would not be able to enter her wireless network.

On my second trip over, I set up the new computer to be on the same workgroup as the old computer and then “View Workgroup Computers” from the new computer to find the old computer, put in the password and had access to all its files. We copied all her photos, Word documents, Excel documents, and miscellaneous things like Family Tree Maker files.

To get all her email messages, I mapped a network drive on the new computer to the C drive on the old computer and then from Outlook Express on the new computer imported all the old messages from their known location on the old computer. Retrieving her address book took me a moment since it was not stored in a Windows Address Book file ending with .wab. I suspect it was in some sort of old Outlook file. I gave up looking for it and simply exported it from Outlook Express on the old computer as a comma delimited file and then copied the file to the new computer and imported it into Outlook Express there. To retrieve her Favorites folder, I simply copied its contents from the old computer into the Favorites folder on the new computer.

That’s all there was to copying all the important files from an old computer to a new one.u