We have an old Windows XP machine that I would like to replace with a newer Windows 7 one. However, my wife is used to the old machine; in particular she has Internet Explorer manage all her auto-complete's and username/passwords for different sites she uses.
I looked around for tools to at least copy the passwords to the new machine but 1) Microsoft says it's not supported 2) the unofficial tools all look super-sketchy.
Any ideas of how to transplant the auto-completes and passwords to a new machine?
You could try the Files and Settings transfer wizard (In Start, Accessories, System...) and see if that works for you. I'm not aware of any tools off the top of my head, but (on principle) I would not rely on any auto-complete/password storage to ensure I could do my day-to-day computing.
There are plenty of tools which help in this area which are guaranteed to provide better support than Microsoft will. Things like KeePassX (for password management) and (while I don't use it, I've hear good things about) Roboform are supported by communities who are invested in a long-term solution. I would really try to migrate to a new solution. Anything else would be putting a band-aid over a festering wound.
I wouldn't say that the articles' metadata (URL, title, date of download, maybe thumbnail of the 1st page) is downloaded content. It's clearly user-generated, and should be in the "home" of the app IMHO.
The articles themselves, yes, send them to the cache. If the user needs to reclaim the storage used up by the articles, let the OS delete them. Then, when the user needs to read the article again, it will take some time to download. But don't get into an "all articles gone" situation. Just my 2 cents.
I'd submit that this is, in some ways, worse: instead of all articles being gone they're now all grayed out, so the user knows they were here, can still see there, but if he's offline he can not access them because only the metadata is left, the data itself is gone.
What problem are you trying to fix? If I'm offline, what good is being able to see my article list if I can't read the articles? If I'm online, why do I feel any less irritated when I try to go back to an article I was just reading only to find that I need to wait for it to download again?
The problem fixed is that the user has an indication as to what happened to all of their saved articles. That's a very big difference. It's not a full solution, as the parent noted, but the UX is far superior.
I thought Instapaper scraped the page and stored that, to accommodate sites that require login for access. So not trivial to just re-download the articles. Plus the whole point is to have them available when you're offline.
I'd say in this case, the content is user-generated and should be backed up.
That's a tough line to argue: the scraped page is actually stored by Instapaper (otherwise you could not access it from the website), so you re-download it from there, and technically it's not user-generated it's at best user-curated.
But this does indeed defeat the point of having it offline, which is a significant part of IP's purpose.
I can totally believe it, we went with the family once to visit/snoop around the Google campus, but if Eric Schmidt or Larry Page had showed up, I don't think I would have recognized them. (And we use Google products every day.)
My recommendation is to take your lumps and move on.
Can you convince your parents to support you for a couple of years until you get your high school diploma and start college? Go into some money-making career that they approve of if needed. Once in college, you can start networking and planning your next move.
Just make them feel like you are back to being a good citizen and that you will go back to earn your keep once you have your college degree.
Oh, and tell your so-called "friends" to go pound sand.
