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This entry is serving as a reminder to myself for the following wretched, irritating and completely unnecessary issue:

SYMPTOM: Upon booting up from a Windows XP installation CD, the screen blanks and the system freezes right after displaying “Setup is inspecting your computer’s hardware configuration”. The system has been known to run Windows XP perfectly before and there has no changes to the hardware.

SOLUTION: Use a partition manager utility to delete any active partitions on the hard drive. Try running the setup again and you will get pass the “Setup is inspecting…” screen.

If you have been keeping tabs on the official Google Blog, you might notice that a couple of days ago they announced the Google Browser Sync extension for the Firefox web browser.

Product Manager Brian Rakowski states:

…unifies your bookmarks, history, saved passwords, and persistent cookies across all the computers where you install it. It also remembers which tabs and windows you had open when you last closed any of your browsers and gives you a chance to reopen them.

Apple Mac OS X users already have this ability on their Safari web browsers with a little help from .Mac Sync (pronounced dot-mac-sync).  This is one of the many reasons why .Mac is appealing; the ability to synchronise your bookmarks (among other things) across any Mac that you log on to. However, unlike .Mac, Google Browser Sync is free.

I got myself an Apple PowerBook G4 early last year which was my first ever Mac. Having been a Windows user almost my entire life (with a tad of Linux here and there), I never thought it would change my web-browsing experience forever. Just like Windows XP has Internet Explorer as their default web browser, Mac OS X has Safari (since v10.3). Initial impressions were fairly inconclusive, as I was so used to Internet Explorer. Over time however, I grew more and more accustomed to it, especially with the inclusion of ‘tabbed browsing’.

In part one, I discussed about the requirements and things you need to consider before taking the plunge. If you’ve pretty much got the general idea and are ready to go ahead, let’s move on.

I have broken down the whole process into six stages:

1. Preparing your web host and database
2. Downloading, configuring and uploading WordPress
3. Exporting all your comments from Haloscan and uploading them
4. Importing from Blogger
5. Importing from Haloscan
6. Tidying up

Don’t worry if anything from the above scares you. I will go through each stage in detail below:

I recently migrated one of my blogs from Blogger, along with all my comments from Haloscan, to WordPress 2.0. It took me a couple of days of research before finally understanding what was needed to accomplish this. Once everything was already in place, it only took a few minutes to move everything across.

WordPress itself is extremely easy to install. If you don’t believe me, have a look at their Famous 5-Minute Install page.