A Court Reporter's Guide to Setting Up Your New Computer, Part I & II

By Keith Lemons

Part I

You thought you were done. You just bought this brand-spanking-new notebook computer with a zillion megabyte hard drive, running at 2 gigs of Hertz, whatever that is, totally Rammed, some kind of TFT or Active Matrix or Plasma thingy screen, a nifty DVD player that can also read and write and something else. Oh, yeah. You've just noticed, after you spent 45 minutes answering all the questions from Microsoft and your computer company, going online somehow and setting up some kind of internet/intranet/VPN - no, it was a network thingy - that none of those buttons or holes on the notebook fit a floppy disk.

Hey! Where do you hook up your machine for realtime? What are all those square holes in the back? Which one of these little round holes do I plug in my mouse, my external keyboard, my microphone for AudioSync? Quite frankly, you don't know what you did or what to do now.

Having just gone through this nightmare scenario with one of our young reporters, I have a few ground rules that everyone ought to know about when transferring your stuff from your old notebook to your new notebook.

• New notebooks don't always come with a floppy drive or a serial port; not to mention two serial ports.
• Windows XP Home is not the same as XP Professional.
• Those square thingies on the back of your notebook are for USB devices. That stands for Universal Serial Bus.
• Notice that I say notebook. They haven't made laptops in more than five years.
• Look at the diagram that came with your notebook. Each port, round hole, square thingy is labeled on the diagram. If you need to call support, you need to know what to call the thingies. It's very frustrating to support people to have to learn a new language every time they talk to a customer!
• You need to have some way of transferring your files from one computer to the other. There are programs you can purchase to do this, or you can use the old backup/restore method using floppy disks or other removable storage media. Notice I said "removable." That means USB drives, flash drives, Zip Drives - or if you're fortunate on your old notebook you had a CD/RW that you can back up to.

Part II

You now have the information you need for your new computer. Here we go into the actual setup phase.

• You need to reinstall all of your important programs from their installation CDs to your new notebook. You can't copy them over from your old computer to your new. When you install something from a CD, it writes parts of its program away from the folder where the main program is located. These other parts of the program are written, generally, under Windows' hood. You don't really want to know more than that, other than they won't work if you don't reinstall.
• After you reinstall the programs, it is now time to restore the backups you made for your programs. This step is essential. If you don't restore the backups, your programs won't have your data. Including your CAT data.
• You need to purchase more stuff. You have to have at least one USB-to-serial converter; that is, one for input from your CAT, one for output to the realtime client, be it a single computer or multiline block. You also may need to buy an external floppy drive and you definitely need lots of writable CDs or DVDs, depending on what you have in your new notebook.
• Now to set up your serial ports. Plug in your new USB converter into one of the USB ports on your computer. Windows will tell you that it has found new hardware. You need the CD or disk for the next step to install the driver. You will undoubtedly be told that Windows has not certified the driver for the serial port. That's okay. Accept it and move on. If your driver works, you'll get a message that Windows has installed your new hardware and it is ready to use.
• Let me sidetrack here for a moment. When you purchase something to use in your USB ports, find the manufacturer's Web site. Then look for the word "support" on their main page. Then look for downloads for updated drivers. You may need this to make your new USB serial port work. I've had three sets now, and I've had to do this each time. If so, download the updated drivers, which will probably be in a zip file, open the file, copy the contents and paste them to a floppy disk. It makes life easier than trying to figure out which folder on the installation CD contains your driver. Not all installation CDs are alike. Except for one thing. They're written by morons. They never seem to work right.
• Now you need to do the following. If you have more than one USB port on your machine, just take note of where the serial cable is plugged in. It shouldn't be important, but it could be. I found out that on my Compaq, if I plug the serial converter from one USB slot to the other, it changes com ports.
• Click on Start, Control Panel and find the System folder. Click on Hardware then Device Manager. Scroll down to where it says Ports (COM&LPT), click the plus sign. Look for the name of your new serial adapter. Note what it says the com port is.
• Go to your CAT software. Change your settings for your realtime input to the new com port number.
• If you're installing a second serial converter, do the same as above except change the com port number for the realtime output.
• Set up your computer like you're going to do a job. Hook in the input serial converter, the output serial converter and the microphone. Set up a new job, then write and speak. Stop the translation, go into the file and see if you not only wrote, but that the AudioSync works.

You should now be at least basically set up to do your job.

Warning: The entire above procedure will take you hours not minutes. Do this preferably the day before your next job. Give yourself time to be stupid. I always incorporate "Stupid time" in every computer thing I do. Because I am, and I do. Just remember that Murphy's law was written before the advent of computers. We should add one sentiment to it. Anything that can go wrong will, at the worst possible time, and when using a computer, it happens fast and exponentially.

Good luck. Oh, and by the way. Congratulations on your new notebook!