JorgeA

BlouBul, Sadly, the Save My Settings Wizard is gone with Office 2007. When I couldn't get to it by following the instructions on the link, I did a Web search and found this. I heard back from Seagate tech support. FWIW, they say that, "The point of try and decide is to create a virtual machine on your backup drive to make changes that don't actually effect [sic] your PC." When I get the chance to, I'm going to try installing Word 2007 within Try&Decide. But you can bet I'll be creating a restore point just before doing that! --JorgeA

Hi BlouBul, The BlackArmor manual claims that, with this feature. "You can perform various system operations not worrying that you might damage your operating system, programs or data." You can see why, for my purposes, it's so alluring! I wish that there were a way to find out ahead of time whether setting up a "virtual" Word 2007 installation inside Try&Decide will in fact not mess with the Registry or my existing Word installation. The reason I'm reluctant to uninstall Word is that, over the past two years, I've made a number of tweaks and adjustments to the default Word settings, and I'd hate like heck to lose them. I couldn't even go in anymore to determine what changes I've made -- all I know is that I made them for a reason, and I'm not exactly eager to discover why all over again. Now, if there is a "Word settings file" that keeps track of all this, and which I could save separately and then somehow re-apply to a fresh Word installation so that it goes back to the way I had it -- in that case we wouldn't be risking anything. We could uninstall and re-install as many times as necessary. The alternative would be a sandbox such as we're talking about, where I might install a fresh "virtual" Word in isolation from the "real" Word. --JorgeA

I think that is a good idea Remember to uninstall Word 2007 first. BlouBul, I haven't had the chance to do anything on this front yet (see my post to dencorso). If possible, I'd like to use that Try and Decide sandbox feature to install a new instance of Word 2007 on it, without either affecting the existing Word 2007 installation or having to uninstall it. --JorgeA

dencorso, Well, finally I have something to report! The CHKDSK of the 1TB drive took about 9 hours, but it finally finished and said that everything is all right with the drive that got knocked over. So then I could proceed to the second backup with full compression. The first attempt, which I ran overnight, failed. When I came back in the morning it was still stuck in the first stage (creating the image). There seemed to be no way to figure out just what the problem was, so I stopped it. The backup then showed up in the backup list, saying that it had been done but with an error. No way to check that, either, at least not that I could find. So I removed it. For good measure I also removed one of the earlier backups that I had mentioned, and then re-ran the image backup with all the settings you specified, at maximum compression. That took another seven hours to finish, but finally it completed without a hitch. The size is 126GB (compared to the 465GB of the uncompressed backup). I'm either going to keep both, or delete the compressed one and then run a second uncompressed backup a month from now, so that I have alternating full "dumb" backups. Whew! --JorgeA

dencorso, I'm going to run CHKDSK on the Seagate and then (if it reports OK) I'll do the "maximum compression" image. But first I wanted to give you the information that you asked for above. Yes, it does appear to be possible to do this. From the BlackArmor opening screen, you select "Manage and restore," then when that comes up you select a backup and click on "Explore backup" at the top. A Windows Explorer window opens up, where you can drill deeper and deeper into the directories till you reach the file you're looking for. I didn't try to actually open any of these files (they're listed under the backup's name as being on drive C:), but there they are. BTW, the BlackArmor software also has an intriguing "Try and Decide" feature where you can sandbox a new program. Maybe I can try running Word 2000 from there without messing up my Office 2007 installations? --JorgeA

dencorso, Wonderful news, thank you! I'll do a new backup keeping all these settings the same (except for maximum compression, and that I will exclude NOTHING) and report back. BTW, I had the external HDD on the floor, standing on its edge with the stand attachment, and happened to knock it flat on its back as I was bringing my foot back from getting something behind it and pulled on the HDD's power cord. Are these things OK with an impact like that? --JorgeA

Hi BlouBul, The uksbsguy.com site is back on line. Very informative discussion there on those two links. He, too, talks about the Registry fix to make Word 2000 and 2007 coexist. But the most important thing that I got out of these web pages is that the scary-sounding "configuration" box that appeared the next time that I loaded Word 2007 after installing 2000, is simply the system's way of putting 2007 back at the front of the line. Let me get familiar with the process for uninstalling Word 2007 (Google is a huge help when it comes to this sort of thing). Assuming that everything resets to default when it's re-installed, I wonder if there might be a way to keep or recover all the little settings adjustments that one makes along the way -- at this point, I wouldn't even know what they all are, or where a hypothetical "Word settings file" might live. As for the Outlook settings, I really hesitate with that one. A couple of months ago, my main customer wanted to give me my own e-mail account within the company domain. I worked with the IT guru for weeks to make the webmail work. We managed to get e-mail that was addressed to me at that account forwarded to my own ISP's webmail and then into Outlook, but d*mned if we could get Outlook to accept the second domain so that I could create and receive e-mail right in Outlook. We ended up breaking Outlook three times, and had to be satisfied with the forwarding service, plus going on their webmail page whenever I want to create or reply to e-mail. A more cumbersome procedure, and it doesn't have HTML, so my e-mail from there looks plain like a typewriter. So I really, really would rather not do anything that could mess with Outlook -- and that bit the other day, where the Outlook icon in the Start menu stopped working, I take it as "fair warning" to keep my hands off! But like I said, let me look into the process of uninstalling and re-installing Word. Not promising anything! Thanks again. --JorgeA

dencorso, After I logged off MSFN last night, I was so riled up that I went back into the BlackArmor program and ran it again. I didn't see your post till this morning, but as it turned out I included all of your suggested settings, except for the one having to do with "source files exclusion." So I re-loaded the backup software to see what that was all about. The "Source files exclusion" defaults to excluding *.BAK, *.~, *.TMP, and *.TIB files. Can we say that leaving these files out will not affect either the reliability of the backup, or the value of the restored image, in case of a total HDD failure? And, except for that possibility, it looks like we have SUCCESS. I let the backup run overnight (it was estimating that it would take about 9 hours) and when I got back to the computer this morning, it was finished. Now for the most important thing: the size of the backup file is 465GB. Both the C: main drive and the D: recovery drive are now imaged. Score one for persistence, if not exactly technical brilliance on my part! --JorgeA

dencorso, This afternoon I ran an image backup while we went to visit a friend in another state. I made sure that "back up unallocated space" was selected this time, in addition to the sector-by-sector setting. However, once again the size came out to 137GB when finished. Either I'm still missing something, or I'm misunderstanding the manual somehow. Here's a link to the BlackArmor manual. It's not identical to the one I have, but hopefully it will be close enough. The only caveat (maybe this is what I'm missing) is that, thinking about it, now I am not certain that I selected "no compression." Maybe it's just that I'm unfamiliar with the process, but it comes off as so d*mn complicated. (Well, we WERE getting ready to go out...) It would be helpful if every option affecting the size of the backup were clearly listed on the same screen, instead of having to wade through waves of menus, some of which don't volunteer to show up. There MUST be a market out there for backup software that, instead of overwhelming non-tech users with an avalanche of different backup types, just gives them a SIMPLE and CLEARLY set out choice to do a SINGLE, ALL-INCLUSIVE type of backup (no fine distinctions, please) for use in case of catastrophic disk failure. I would call the product "KISS" (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and the slogan could be, "The one and only backup you'll need in your time of need!" [end of rant] One mitigating factor that may spare us (me) from having to run through the process all over again: I went back in as far as where the compression level setting hides under "Backup options" in the middle of the list. It provides estimates of the size of the backup at each level. Whereas "maximum" compression is calculated to take up 80.18GB, and "High" compression 82.22GB, "Normal" compression (the default) is still at only 93.99GB. You would think that "No" compression hardly could jump suddenly five times in size to the ~465GB level that I seek, no?, So that would still leave us searching for the right settings that will produce the "dumb" unselective image we want. --JorgeA Edit: I'm not the only one who's noticed the complexity of the BlackArmor backup software. There must be a happy medium between dumbed-down "consumer" backup sottware intended basically to back up documents and pictures (leaving your OS and programs vulnerable) and complex BlackArmor-type software that buries the user in choices with unfamiliar nomenclature and mysterious distinctions.

BlouBul, I want to report that I tried the Office Diagnostics that we discussed, and nothing turned up. The program says that there is nothing wrong with my Office installation. I'm still working up the courage to try putting the Office 2000 CD back in there. Although I will say that I've been reading up on running both 2000 and 2007 on the same PC, and this is a known situation, for instance here, here, here, here, and here. (There is some opinion that it works the same for Office 2000 and 2003, relative to Office 2007.) --JorgeA

Thanks dencorso, I''l try this over the weekend! --JorgeA

Thanks, dencorso! I see in the BlackArmor manual that the preset compression level is "Normal," and that there are choices for "High," "Maximum," and "None." Next time I do this I'll try "None." Although, come to think of it, I believe that I did see that and that I did select "None" for compression. But still I got only a 137GB disk image. What other factors could be at play? Oh, wait. Looking elsewhere in the guide, I see that when selecting a sector-by-sector backup, there is a choice to "back up unallocated space." That must be the difference, right? I don't remember if I did anything with that particular setting. --JorgeA

BlouBul, Thanks for the tips! I'll examine the options on the Office 2000 CD bearing in mind what you said. Tomorrow there should be time to try the Word repair install. About those e-mail settings: maybe what I'm remembering is just how overwhelming the entire process was, considering that my previous PC was largely unusable and I literally had to start from scratch, with a whole new system, new software, even a new e-mail account. That's what persuaded me to get serious about knowing my tech. Two years ago this month. Oh, and the old PC turned out to need only a good interior dusting. Had I been more diligent about keeping it clean, I might still be doing my work on Windows 98 and dialup... But I'm glad I got the new computer anyway. --JorgeA

dencorso, Wow, I stumbled into doing something right!! One question that maybe should wait till your workload lightens up has to do with the size of that sector-by-sector image. I was prepared to end up with a ~465GB image of my "500GB" drive, including all the unused space. But when the image was done, it was only 137GB -- that is, the amount of space that's actually in use. I thought that the sector-by-sector image took everything and included it, whether or not the sector contained any information? But the explanation can wait if time is at a premium. --JorgeA

dencorso, You didn't know this because the issue has been on the back burner so it hasn't come up in detail lately, but... while we waited, I've been trying out the Seagate BlackArmor Backup software for one of the external HDDs I bought. Now I have two HDD images, one of them a full backup + a later incremental backup, and the other a "sector-by-sector" backup. This, in addition to the multiple traditional-type file backups in various places in and out of my computer. So I should be covered, for what such backups are worth. Thus my concern about losing the .PST file had more to do with the PITA aspect of possibly having to reinstall Outlook and re-do all those arcane e-mail settings that I dimly understand, than with a fear of losing the data. Of course, I'd rather not have to go through the process of restoring an image. Had I realized that the Office 2000 CD would make changes to the Registry, I wouldn't have gone ahead with it. But the setup program's seeming assurances that the programs would run off the CD (the choice that I checked off for Word) definitely threw me. Happily, it turned out that what was done could be undone, and as a result of the experience we are now pretty sure that the culprit isn't Norton, or slow hardware, but Office 2007. As for those backups, I've decided that I much prefer the conceptual simplicity of the sector-by-sector standalone backup. I'll be doing one whole new one every month. I don't care for the complexities of the "incremental" and "differential" backup concepts -- despite all my reading, I've never felt comfortable with them, and probably never will. They simply come off to me as needlessly complicated. A full disk image, though, I can dig -- it's a complete, all-encompassing, workable copy of the HDD at a single point in time. So I plan to do one of these each month, supplemented by file/data backups (incremental, I guess) on a weekly basis as I've been doing since last year, and deleting the older images as the 1TB drive fills up. I may even move to weekly full HDD images and dispense with all this incremental stuff altogether. I greatly appreciate your concern, though!! And, FWIW, thanks to this practice with BlackArmor I'm now much better positioned to follow and truly learn the process that you propose to demonstrate. I'm sure that what I did can be improved on. --JorgeA

Hey puntoMX, I'm still tempted to upgrade the hardware and see what difference it makes, but you're right -- the original motivation is disappearing fast. OTOH, maybe I'll wait a few months for the new Sandy Bridge processors to come out and push down the price on the i7 980X , so that then I can buy a new PC with one of those in it. --JorgeA

No If you choose install on first use, next time you try to open Outlook (which you want to be Outlook 2007), it will install Outlook 2000. Rather choose Don't install for the features you already have and do not want to replace. BlouBul, Well, that's the thing -- the installation program didn't seem to offer a clear choice to say, "don't install this component at all," at least not that I can remember now. Honestly, though, I'm amazed that this ancient software even ran at all in Vista x64. When I tried the CompuServe installation CD, it flat out gave me an error message saying that it wouldn't work. Hopefully, it won't get to the point where I have to think about redoing those settings! AFAICR when you insert your Office 2007 cd, and select install, it will see that you have already Office install and ask you if you rather want to repair your installation. Office Diagnostics also have that feature (not sure if it is the same, but can be accessed by typing appwiz.cpl in the Search programs and files box http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924611 Excellent, thanks! That doesn't sound too terrifying... OK, give me a couple of days and I will try the first one, and then report back. I agree. We do seem to be getting closer to the solution. --JorgeA

awergh, I didn't kinow that, that's interesting. I don't think I installed an earlier Outlook last night, but then it's not totally clear what the Office 2000 installation CD was or was not doing. (Curiously, when I popped the CD into the tray and closed it, my Vista PC read it but nothing happened. It wasn't until I went into Windows Explorer and clicked on the CD drive, that the setup program launched.) Whatever happened, it does look like I managed to undo it and put everything back to the way it was, without having to actually reinstall any software. Thanks for joining the conversation. The thread now officially takes place over four continents. Isn't high-tech amazing! --JorgeA

BlouBul, Silly me -- I was hoping that by doing the settings as I described (setting it up on a different drive, and telling it to run from the CD) it would avoid messing up the existing Office installation. Oops. Maybe the shortcut just changed. Either navigate to outlook.exe through explorer or maybe try repairing outlook from the cd. Apparently (and happily), the reconfiguring that occurred when I clicked on Outlook served to repair the problem. Did you install Office 2000 or only Word 2000 as recommended? Well, it was not entirely clear how to do that. IIRC, for the other Office 2000 programs I ended up selecting the choice to "instlal on first use," so theoretically only the programs that I tried to open would have installed, and only at that moment and not before. Always a good idea to backup (just copy when outlook is not running) your outlook.pst file first, although it should still be in its original place afterwards. Also if you have your username and password, it should be easy to setup your mail again (there is usually a method on their website), although theoretically that should not be necessary if you install only Word. I remember setting that up the first time a couple years ago. (Before then, I used CompuServe, which did all the heavy lifting for me.) It was a mysterious, opaque, frustrating process that I'm not all that eager to repeat! Today I'm much more familiar with computing (and e-mail) concepts than I was then, but still I'd rather avoid it if possible. Fortunately, what I did last night didn't erase the .PST file. The second time is always easier Anyway with these results we have to repeat it! Umm... maybe! Some garbage must have been removed with the reconfiguration. Wonder if a repair install will help? How do you do a repair install? I found the Office Diagnostics function. Is that what you mean? Hmm -- I'm not sure (other than Clippy ). Offhand, other than being able to read .docx files, nothing jumps to mind. Oh yeah, I can create PDFs right in Word without needing the full-blown Adobe Acrobat. I guess it's the sort of situation where you don't miss a feature till you no longer have it. BlouBul, thanks for hanging in there with me! --JorgeA

Hi BlouBul, Well, I finally found the Office 2000 disks and -- since nobody piped in with guidance one way or another -- tried installing Word 2000 on my Vista tower. What a mistake that was!! I thought that maybe I could avoid registry-type problems by telling the installation program to use a new folder in drive J (a Pocket Media backup drive that I always keep in its externally accessible bay) for the Office files, as well as to "run the program from the CD." No dice. After launching the newly set up Word 2000 (more about that later), out of curiosity I then tried to launch Word 2007 -- and I got a box saying that the program needed to be configured!?! Then I tried to open Outlook, and I got a message saying that it could not be found, and did I want to remove the link I had just clicked! The first thing I tried was a System Restore. It went through the process, the PC started back up, all the usual startup programs came online... and then a box telling me that System Restore had failed and nothing had been changed. Uh-oh. Next I went into the Program Manager and uninstalled Office 2000, then for good measure tried the previous System Restore, and nervously watched the computer run through its steps all over again. This time it didn't give me the dreaded failure message, and to make sure that everything worked I went to open Word 2007. But at that point, that box about configuring Word came up again. Sh*t. Well, what else was there to do other than go on to re-install the software, I thought. So I was resigned to the whole tedious process, wondering all along what might have become of my Outlook .PST file and would I have to re-do all the mumbo-jumbo I'd had to do with my ISP's webmail server way back when. As these anxious thoughts raced through my mind, Word finished coming back up. I clicked on the Office button, and to my surprise the list of recently opened documents was showing. Wow, everything appeared normal. So I opened Outlook, hopefully, and it too got "reconfigured;" when it was done, all my e-mail was there in all the right places, and all my settings were as before. What a relief!!! So everything appears to be OK. Oh yes, about the Word 2000 test. It was nice to see Clippy again... And now for the most important thing: the original, offending Word file took 26 seconds to open the first time, and 20 seconds the second time. (And that's with Norton 360 still installed and intact.) As always, that's the time from the moment I clicked to open the file from within the program, till the moment that the page counter showed the last page number. (The little book animation was still going on, but AFAIK I had full editing functionality.) Wow. It looks increasingly like it really is Word's fault. I'm not sure I'm eager to repeat the experiment, though. It was kind of a nail-biting experience. One last thing. FWIW, I did a single test opening of the same file in the "reconfigured" Word, and the time was 2:49, compared to the 3:20 and 3:40 or more that we've had before. What do you think? --JorgeA

Hi BlouBul, In theory, I should be able to find my Office 2000 install disk. Is it possible to install Word 2000 on my main PC without overwriting the existing Word/Office 2007 directories or (maybe more importantly) the Registry settings for Word/Office? --JorgeA

puntoMX, Not insulted at all, but enormously appreciative, thanks! Your setup that you described is interesting. I'd heard of OpenDNS, IIRC on one of the podcasts by Steve Gibson (another one who has some detractors). I will look into it further and see how it works. --JorgeA

dencorso, That sounds great! There were some fantastic sales at the stores yesterday (Black Friday in the U.S.), so I picked up a couple of pen drives. (Among other things.) I can wait to do this till you have the time. I'm also willing to learn how to make that full, dumb image that you have talked about. Thank you for being so patient with my trepidation about experimenting on a full HDD! --JorgeA

Hi Bloubul, OK, I am going to throw yet another ingredient into this gigantic mix. I remembered that I had a couple of enormous Word files that contain only photographs. (I haven't always been as sophisticated as people think, ahem...) These are literally nothing more than collections of JPG files with no text content whatever. (Yeah, REALLY sophisticated!!) One file is 207 MB in size and the other is 160 MB. That is, much larger than the 5 or 7 MB files that we had been experimenting with. They are also each over 700 pages (one JPG per page), compared to the ~500-page documents we had before. Out of curiosity, I just tried opening these in Word under all normal settings and conditions (meaning, with Norton running ). Each one was opened seven times. The 160MB file took 10, 15, 17, 15, 16, 16, and 16 seconds to open; the 210MB one, 14, 14, 15, 15, 16, 17, and 16. Again, as before, the measurement was taken with a stopwatch from the moment I clicked on the file's name from within Word till the moment that the number for the last page showed up in the page counter at the bottom left of the Word screen. The difference between these files and ordinary Word documents is the complete lack of text, and of text formatting. Whatever Norton may do, it's not affecting the opening of these even bigger files. Therefore I'm nominating Word as the main candidate for the source of the slow loading as it does whatever it will do with text. And specifically Word 2007, considering that (as you reminded us) the earlier version of Word (2000) opened the offending file much faster with an ancient, plodding CPU. How does this sound to you? --JorgeA

BlouBul, Here's why I'm thinking that better hardware will help. Correct me if I'm wrong (there's a good chance of that, of course ). Back in the other thread, when I opened the original offending file in Windows Safe Mode, the average time to finish opening the file went down to 2:59, compared to -- what was it, about 3:40 or so on average when opening it in normal Windows. The dreaded Norton is nowhere to be seen in Safe Mode. I tried opening that file three times in Safe Mode again yesterday. The times were 2:58, 2:39, 2:47. So, whatever behind-the-scenes processing is going on in normal Windows (and it may not all be Norton's fault) is adding no more than a minute to the total time, or less than one-third. I have to think that if I upgrade my CPU, all the avoidable and unavoidable processing is going to go faster. CoffeeFiend believed that a Pentium E5500 would run 60% faster than my current E2200; it sounds plausible to say that for $30 more, an E6800 would do even better. And compared to the time (and risk) involved in repeated de- and re-installations of Office and Norton and the HDD image, it's bound to be both safer and less time-consuming. Don't know how much of the file loading time is accounted for by processing in the CPU, but if I can shave 60% off that time, we're looking at maybe upwards of two minutes saved on the loading times, vs. less than one minute saved by obliterating Norton. Agreed on the "resource hog" aspect of Norton products starting around 2004. Back then (and not knowing any better) I had it on my Windows 98 tower, and I can't tell you how many times my computer ground to a halt (requiring a restart) under the weight of all that stuff. But my understanding is that current versions of Norton are much lighter in their touch, and the Resource Monitor appears to confirm that on my Vista tower. BTW, I love the Eset online scanner. I use it as a backup for Norton and Spybot, and it allows me to scan even the PCs on the network that are too old to run the scanner directly (like that Win98 tower). --JorgeA