Aspirations, thoughts, and Operator overloading

You’d think something like this would be incredibly easy, maybe even be in an options tab or possibly prefs.js in the user’s profile.

Eh, sort of.

The setting is in localstore.rdf within the user’s profile. This value is supposed to be saved automatically when closing out of the browser, as this page mentions.

In my case I want a lab of users to all receive the same “maximize window” setting. Thankfully, the user profile being used is thin and I don’t have to worry about them having a personalized localstore.rdf file.

Here is the file I’ll use:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- 
    $Id$
    $HeadURL$
 
    Purpose: Set the Firefox window to maximized. This file would be copied
             over on every login, thereby preventing the window from coming up
             sized smaller. Users are able to size it themselves during their
             browsing session however.
-->
<RDF:RDF xmlns:NC="http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#"
         xmlns:RDF="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
  <RDF:Description RDF:about="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul#sidebar-title"
                   value="" />
  <RDF:Description RDF:about="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul#main-window"
                   sizemode="maximized" />
  <RDF:Description RDF:about="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul">
    <NC:persist RDF:resource="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul#main-window"/>
    <NC:persist RDF:resource="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul#sidebar-box"/>
    <NC:persist RDF:resource="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul#sidebar-title"/>
  </RDF:Description>
</RDF:RDF>

Here is the relevant value:

sizemode="maximized"

Hope somebody finds that useful.

A friend of mine (adopted brother) accidentally infected his laptop with malware and I’ve finally made time (and was able to) to restore his setup.

He has an Acer Aspire 5500 with Windows XP Media Center 2005, but didn’t have restore discs. After calling Acer tech support I was quoted a $30 fee for replacement.

Seemed high, but there didn’t seem to be any other option. Due to funding issues at the time the restore task was put on hold.

A week later I was repairing another family member’s desktop system and had to call Dell for restore discs. They shipped me a new set free of charge and were very quick about it (no nonsense dialog and shipping both). In the future I’ll be sure to use their online chat for all trouble issues as it was a breeze.

I mention both of these situations because of the similarities and the differences.

In both cases I had a backup of their profiles and wanted to restore them with all settings intact. I did the following:

1. Backed the systems up
2. Restored the systems
3. Created a user account with non-admin rights for them to use as their day-to-day tasks.
4. Logged in with the new account
5. Rebooted the system so the newly created account’s registry hive would be unloaded.
6. Copied the old files over and choosing to overwrite the new files.
7. Loaded the registry hive and granted full rights to the newly created non-admin account.

That is where the similarities ended.

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