PC Migration in the Internet 2.0 Era

Last week, my company’s 4-year “forceful” auto refresh program dispatched a ThinkPad T61 to replace my 4-year old ThinkPad T41. The company’s policy is 3-year refresh cycle but I was too lazy to ask for a new one in the last 12 months as I really didn’t want to go through the painful and time consuming migration process. Additionally, my ThinkPad T41 had had been very stable and durable, except when I spilt tea on it twice resulting into motherboard and keyboard replacements.

I was apprehensive of the migration because I thought it would be as painful and time consuming as my previous ones had been. Application re-installs (and who had all those CDs?), CD/DVD burning of my data, and re-configuration of so many programs. I was so dead wrong.

Here is it how it goes. As soon as I got my new PC, I dug up my text file of the “PC migration tasks” and started going through it.

My PC was already loaded with the corporate image containing all the security and office software so I crossed them out quickly. Also, 3 years ago, I migrated to the outside disk drive “continuous data protection” solution to backup all of the data from my user direction. The new ThinkPad immediately pulled the multiple GB of the data in just few minutes from the external disk drive over the USB 2.0 port. So, there was no need to burn the data CD. But the shocker for me was the no more need of the web bookmarks. I had stopped using del.icio.us bookmarks as I had started to browse the entire web through the Google Reader. And FireFox bookmarks were also not needed because my habits had changed. I just remembered every main website (yahoo.com, google.com, etc.) because I visited them everyday. And the rest of my web browsing was either through Web search or Google Reader search in case I wanted to visit an article I had either tagged or had in the back of my mind. So, this PC migration signaled the “death of web bookmarks” to me.

Thereafter, I went through the software installs on my PC. Out of that, I had stopped all of that because either they were programming tools (I transitioned to product management full time 4 years ago) or just desktop tools that were not needed in the era of Internet 2.0. I moved to the Quicken online in lieu of the installation, and had already uploaded my pictures to the Flickr in lieu of local software. I had stopped using the MSN, Yahoo or Google Talk as my company’s communication took place exclusively over Sametime. And I rarely found any time to do personal instant messaging. I preferred phone text messaging, voice calls (yes, my mom still wants to talk to me), twittering, Facebooking, and friendfeeding. I questioned myself. Do I really those IM clients? Not really but I still took few minutes to install them. Lastly, the most time consuming task was the migration of my lotus notes (yeah, we are mandated to use that) local connections and references to the team rooms over to the new PC.

Lastly, I had to install iTunes as there was no cloud-based version of that. I was disappointed more because Apple’s iTunes also didn’t allow me to download the songs from the iTunes cloud. I had to manually copy from the old PC. I did wonder as when we will see the iTunes to be in the cloud and allow us to just change PCs and de-authorize the old PC through the web. May be Apple needs some competitive pressure to work on it?

Now, if I was a programmer, my migration would have at least included a compiler / JDK installation and code editor like Eclipse. I doubt that compilers will go into the cloud but I do wonder if the local tools (i.e. Eclipse) would just be able to store the configuration of the workbench in the cloud and just retrieve it on the 2nd PC. May be they already do that as I don’t know as I don’t use the programming tools anymore.

All of the above took little over an hour (lotus notes took most of it) and I was ready with the new laptop. I immediately fired-up FireFox and was surfing the web.

So, going forward, I won’t be apprehensive of changing PCs. If my company moves the mail to the web and apple moves iTunes to the cloud, I would be 100% cloud-computing (my local external drive is part of that cloud) compatible.