I was finally required to retire my beloved Dell Latitude E6500 at work and replace him with an HP EliteBook Folio 9470m, downgrading from a 15.6" screen to a dinky little 14" (and having to get up my Office 03 for the aggrevation that is 2010 – I HATE the ribbon). I'll admit, the HP is faster for sure: copying 20 GBs from the old system to a USB drive took about 4 hours, on the new it took 30 minutes. It starts in seconds and so far all my apps load pretty darn fast. And yes, it is significantly lighter, weighing just under 3 lbs versus the 6 lbs or so my Dell weighed.
I hate HP laptops, though – the double button touch pad is just *ugh* and the keyboard is so hideous. I'm an extremely tactile person, so I just cannot stand using certain kinds of keyboards. So to deal with all that, I got a second monitor at work and a standalone keyboard, allowing me to basically use the laptop as a desktop that is docked off to the side and out of the way. 😉
Here is my old set up:
and the new:
Anyway, as I'm sure all of you can identify with, changing systems means going through the hell that is moving over files, settings, etc. Windows Easy Transfer mostly got my settings over, with some random quirks, and I was able to get all my programs reinstalled. So then it was getting Dreamweaver back to how I like it. First – for the workspace layout, since I stayed on the same version of Dreamweaver, I was able to just copy over the various folders from the old app data folder to the new.
Unfortunately, that doesn't bring over my 28 or so site definitions. Dreamweaver helpfully includes the ability to export site definitions, though; you can even select them all and export them all at once. For those who haven't used this feature, go to Site > Manage Sites. Select the site(s) you want to export and hit the export button, then tell it where to put the resulting STE file and whether it should include your log in information. On the new system, hit Manage Sites again, click Import, and select the ones to import. Easy peasy.
Unless, of course, you are moving from a system where your hard drive was partitioned to one where it isn't; and your files on the old system were on the D: partition. Normally, this would necessitate a ton of dialogs appearing, at least two for each site, prompting for the location of the site files because they aren't where the definition says they should be. It's a slow, aggrevating process.
This time, I decided to just try something – remembering that most of Dreamweaver's config type files are really just XML files. So I opened all the STE files from my export in Dreamweaver to take a look.
Well what do you know…these are too! So I just did a quick find and replace to switch out the old D: paths with the new C: ones, saved, then did my import. No dialogs and everything is happy! Yay!