I took delivery of my new work computer today and spent the next 10 hours or so installing crap, resetting cloud storage/mirrors, etc. It was pretty painless except for some minor speedbumps:
Google Drive: Don't bother moving the contents of a Google Drive by hand into a new machine, it simply won't work. It is easier to just let it pull the contents into a clean folder. This ate probably 4 hours of my day today.
Biometrics: I use a fingerprint scanner, which is made by a company that got bought and immediately shut down. They don't support their software, and Imagine it's only a matter of time before replacement scanners will only be found on eBay. Dell now ships a bundled security app that has a driver that works with my scanner, which blocks my passwords bank app from installing. This ate probably 2 hours of my day trying to figure out that all I needed to do was uninstall the Dell app. I did not even need to re-enroll my fingerprints, all I had to do was import my vault from the old machine.
FVD Speed Dial is a wonderful Chrome extension, and it has a sync companion extension that suffers from 90% syndrome. It does the job, but only 90%. In my case I was able to sync all of my dials, but it did not carry the screen caps. Another half-hour wasted.
Permissions: I thought I was so smart. I keep all of the critical data on an external SATA drive. $20 or so bought a USB 3 enclosure for the drive, but speed wasn't the issue: the damn thing kept the permissions from the old machine, so I had to re-shuffle permissions on about 150GB worth of crap. Multiple times. I probably burned another couple hours on this.
Activating Office 2013 apps: My machine is on a Windows domain, which means some apps don't see your credentials as having the right admin access. I wasn't able to activate Office, Visio or Project 2013 until I had them run as administrator. Oh, and no usable error message either, it simply gave me a generic error.
Everything else went smoothly, the only big app that took time to install was VS 2012 Premium. And I am sure I still have another 100 or so service patches to install.
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