Alan Zisman -> mark lewis said..

 AZ> Yesterday, a friend w. a Toshiba laptop brought it over for me
 AZ>  to take a look... she had taken it into a computer shop, ...
 AZ> the shop replied by reinstalling Win 7, with her currently
 AZ> installed programs and settings being backed up into a Backup
 AZ> folder - so she got it back with effectively a clean Windows
 AZ> installation, and programs (etc) that were no longer usable.

 AZ> I helped her reinstall programs, printer drivers, etc etc.

 AZ> If this was a Mac and the same (stupid) 'fix' had been done,
 AZ> the applications (etc) copied into the backup folder would
 AZ> have still been usable and could be simply copied back into
 AZ> the Mac's (new) Applications folder. No 'registry' issues,
 AZ> etc.

I can attest to the latter.  I rebuilt a friend's PowerPC G3 Mac and it was
a rather painless matter to get the old apps all back and running.

The original harddrive was 10GB and only 500MB free. I needed to install a
new printer, but that required at least 300MB free. So.. a new hdd was in
order.

[1] I removed the old hdd and put it in an external case.
[2] I installed OS X onto new hdd.
[3] Dragged and dropped the user's apps from the old hdd into the new
"apps" folder of the new hdd.
[4] Done.

However... the ease of this process is more a testament to BSD unix than to
the Apple Macintosh.  The same drag-drop of apps can be accomplished with
Ubuntu.


 AZ> Jean is right - no fun at all! (I got a good bottle of wine
 AZ> for helping her that I wouldn't have earned if she had a Mac).

If she had a Mac and brought it to the store, probably not.  but if she
brought it to you and you fixed it in short order, maybe you could have
earned 2 or more bottles of wine!

--- Thunderbird 2.0.0.24 (Windows/20100228)