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I take it all back about the “giddyness” I said I would experience a few days ago; well, not completely. These past two days have been lethally full of stuff for me; orientation for college started today and will continue tomorrow, so I’ve been prepping for that, on top of the new computer needed to have files, profiles, mail, settings, preferences, programs, and a whole bunch of junk transferred from the old PC to the new one, resulting in a ton of stress.
Operating Firefox and Thunderbird without most of my mail, favorites, themes, and extensions has been a real blast to the past; not something I particularly care for. However, there are a few cool features I discovered about Firefox, in particular, when delving around…
Diving around the Firefox support forums I came across profile managing, or a way to manage your bookmarks, themes, extensions, saved passwords, history, and other idiosyncrasies and details you want exclusive to your Firefox surfing experience. Unfortunately, this isn’t well advertised, as it’s a primarily “developer” oriented feature; but I’ve been testing it out to much enjoyment. It takes a miniscule amount of command line editing to enable, but once you’ve enabled it, you can start working immediately. Firefox should be closed when you start this…
First, locate a Firefox shortcut. Right click on the FF shortcut you wish to modify; preferably, one that you regularly use. Right-click it and bring up the Properties menu. Where it says: “Target” you should see the directory path the shortcut follows. On the end of that string, insert “-ProfileManager” without the quotes. The final product should look like this: (“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -ProfileManager). Once you’ve done that, start up Firefox and it will show a bunch of options. They’re fairly self-explanitory, so you can’t go wrong.
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Copying Profile Folders / Backing up Profiles
This is important, especially if you have a new PC but can’t remember that one tech site you always visit…you know, PaulTech! It involves some simple “Copy->Paste”, but unless you your basic Firefox framework is the same, certain add-ons will not work until you update either them or Firefox is updated to standards. Shouldn’t be too big a problem, as Mozilla does that automatically. This should also be done with Firefox closed.
Find the folder where Firefox has stored your profile information. This should look something like “C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles“. TIP: You will need to be able to view hidden folders and files if seeking that directory from the explorer window. Otherwise, you can replace the [user] portion with the name of your login and you can simply input that into the address bar to go straight to the source.
Inside the “Profiles” folder you should find the “default” or other named profiles. Via your USB device or network connection, you can simply copy and move the folder from the original PC to the newly acquired PC. On the next restart of Firefox, you should be up and running without a problem.
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Picture courtesy of: Mozilla
PS: To clarify about some of the stuff regarding my new PC:
* Power Supply Unit is a Rosewill 500W LED unit. Link to Newegg listing.
* I didn’t actually get close to using a Dremel tool. I was able to modify the case simply by removing the parts in question with a screwdriver. That kind of thing would be last resort, though. The Zalman CPU cooler was going into my computer, period, and it would be obstructed without modification, so I kept the Dremel on standby, just in case.
* OS is Microsoft XP Pro OEM. I’ll admit I was a bit hasty, since with my new student ID, I could’ve gone down to the college marketplace and gotten a student XP Pro OEM license for 8 bucks. A bit hasty.
* Finally, yes, it is true that Intel is rolling out a huge price drop in processors later this year (closer to a month or so away); but I don’t think a Socket 775 architecture will be going away anytime soon, and this Core 2 processor is doing incredibly well, so I’m happy about my choice.
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