I am in the army of Linux-only people who "deals with" friends' Windows PCs, thus making Microsoft look better than they deserve and Bill Gates richer thanks to no effort on his part.
Microsoft's apparent attitude to this sullen army of volunteer helpers: No good deed goes unpunished.
Case in point. Some friends' PC died; they got a new one; the disk out of the old one was fine and readily sprang to life in a USB external enclosure. They'd like to move their old stuff over to the new machine.
That would be a few minutes' easy work under Linux (but this is Windows).
Ah! But what's this?! "Windows Easy Transfer" [WET] (under Windows 7) -- "Helps you transfer personal files, e-mail, data, files, media, and settings from your old computer to the new one." Fantastic! And it can read from an external USB drive -- glory be!
Sadly, you have to have "prepared" for the "Easy Transfer" by running WET on the old machine first -- presumably before the puff of smoke and the acrid smell in the air.
SIGH. And does WET have any sort of second-best fallback option? e.g. "We can't transfer your user accounts, but we can at least move some documents over for you?" (You know, the equivalent of a one-line shell script.)
No, of course not. (What, exactly, do all of those "programmers" in Redmond do all day every day?)
So I'm doing Windows Tedious Transfer [WTT]. Copying files/folders around, deleting Obviously Useless things (e.g. cookie files), and so on. I.e. doing a third-rate job taking eight times as long.
No good deed goes unpunished.
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