Technical advice needed

[karen2205]

I'm trying to tidy my computer system up a bit - in the hope that this might stop it crashing quite so much. I did a lot of deleting of random things last night (and in the process found a copy of dreamweaver waiting to be installed!).

I've also copied all my documents to a portable harddrive and from there to my housemate's computer so he can put them on to CD Rom for me. Unfortunately, many of my documents have titles that are too long, and going through renaming everything individually will take me hours. So does anyone have any suggestions on quick ways to rename everything (preferably while retaining useful file names so that I can find stuff again)?

Was just thinking about reinstalling ME/getting someone to send me 2000 disks, and realised that I can't do that until I work out how to deal with Sage (accounting software - does the staff wages), oh and check that my CD drive still works - I know it won't play music due to me deleting something, but I suspect/hope that's a different piece of software.

Comments

[cultureofdoubt.livejournal.com]

How about putting them in subdirectories by rough categories and then putting each bunch of files in the subdirectory in a .zip file so the long filenames can be preserved? It's simple, portable and doesn't rely on any particularly peculiar extensions or software.

If you turn off zip compression too it would be fairly fast I'd have thought.

Re:

[karen2205]

How do I put things into a .zip file?

I've only ever used Winzip to unzip things IIRC.

Re:

[cultureofdoubt.livejournal.com]

I haven't used Winzip in ages, and it depends on the mode you use (wizard or classic) but it should be a fairly simple drag and drop affair.

Newer Windows versions do it through creating 'compressed folders' or something I think.

Re:

[karen2205]

It's all OK now, Chris showed me how it's done - though given the number of times I right click things, I really ought to have been able to guess.....

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

If you're wanting to do that, I recommend an archive. Tar or Winzip, or one of the more esoteric ones. That should preserve names and structure with relatively less pain.

Re:

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

Although I would add, check it's valid and not corrupted before you delete anything.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

If you have the files on a portable hard disk, why do you need to copy them onto CD? There's always the point about "the more copies exist, the better", I guess...

Re:

[karen2205]

No, the hard disk is Chris', not mine - that was just the way to move them from my computer to his.