I vote for the man, not the brand so to speak so I try not to bring pre-conceived notions to the table when buying a laptop. I want power, speed, and portability. I want a mobile office that works as hard as I do, and that's hard to find! This one is an HP dv7 with the Intel Core i7-2670QM Processor 2.20GHz, 8 mb of ram and a terabyte drive and (we'll soon see) 9 1/2 hours of battery life.
Right away, I already see that I don't like the location of the power input right next to the disk drive. With it plugged in, it makes it too hard to get disks in and out.
Anyway I always cringe when I have to setup a new computer, so I thought I would create a deployment strategy. I'm going to give it my best shot, so that I can forget all this and come back here next time I crack my computer.
First things first, Adobe Master Collection goes on my disk.
MS Office (export all emails from Outlook - this is time consuming - export inbox, sent and deleted folders to csv and then import ) I found that the export didn't transfer all of my emails. Will have to look into that further. Had to set up all email accounts.
Next I really need to use IIS for my local server, but I have had problems in the past with setting it up with git so I end up using Apache. So SNAG. Let's see if this time I can set it up properly.
Am on Windows 7 Home Premium so had to enable the IIS server
That was easy:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731911.aspx
Next installed CF9 to work with IIS - ran into some problems here that were resolved by this excellent article: http://www.codecurry.com/2009/09/installing-coldfusion-on-iis-7.html
Basically installing IIS isn't enough. You have to go into Windows Features and turn on ISAPI filters and extensions and you have to check IIS metabase and IIS 6 compatibility.
So far so good - had to remember to edit the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file to point the IP address to the header host name.
Then I had a major headache trying to save sites in the C:\Users\Cathy folder. Why do I want to save them there? Quite honestly, my reason is just because it's easier to use git from that folder. I ended up having to assign a username and password to the anonymous login. This was really not straightforward and there were no good articles on it that I could find. To do that, right click on the root folder in IIS and double click on Authentication, then right click on Anonymous Authentication and enter your username and password there. I used the username and password I use to log onto the computer. You also have to make sure the user you specify has permissions to at least read the contents of the directory where you are putting your site. On this, it was no problem since I am putting the sites in my own user folder.
But then, I ran into another snag with the URL rewriting not working. I tried installing this: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appid=urlrewrite2 with no luck.
After a lot of frustration, I decided it was easier to just leave the darn site in the inetpub wwwroot folder! If I ever figure that out, I'll post.
After that, I installed MySQL 5.5. They have made this a lot easier with a windows installer.
Installed mysysgit - now for this I had to generate another key for SSH. Here are the instructions: https://help.github.com/articles/generating-ssh-keys
I still have to figure out how to eliminate having to type in the passphrase.
Installed CFBuilder - had to add the details for the server
and installed WS_FTP Pro. On this, I had to go to the c:\users\cathy\appdata\roaming\ipswitch\ws_ftp\sites folder and copy the ws_ftp.ini file to my new computer to get my existing sites.
Navicat Premium (Transfer over all databases - this was easy to just export and import my connections).
then I just have to deal with my pet peeves like showing file extension types: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/865219
