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When does it just become too much trouble

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tinjaw:
I am vacillating between two extremes. (That seems to be a common occurrence with me. 8)) On the one extreme is configuring everything, on an "as needed" basis via GUIs and scripting everything via registry keys and the like.

What the heck am I talking about? Let me explain via an example.

Setting the home page of Internet Explorer. Should I do it via nLite? The IE GUI? Via some "Tweak" utility? Via some script, be that AutoIT, AHK, or native .BAT?

What about the Command Prompt window? I like to change the font and set the scroll buffer to 9999 lines among other things. Ir *feels* like I do this a dozen times a week for one reason or another.

What I am thinking about doing is taking an idea from *NIX of having configuration files in your home directory and combining it with version control and some synchronization software.

The workflow would work something like this:

* Don't make any changes to a system except via some scripted means.
* Put the script(s) into my "home" directory.
* Put those under version control
* Set up the appropriate synchronization software to push those scripts up to the cloud
* Have a "bootstrap" script that I put on all new computers that pulls the scripts down from the cloud and runs them to configure the computer I am on.
My guess is that I will do most of this via registry changes made via AutoIT.

Is this going overboard? But I do work on dozens of machines weekly. Many of which are virtual machine I create and throw away often.

The whole reason is that I think about home much time I would save not having to make changes manually as well as how much more productive I would be if everything was the same way on each machine I use making things more muscle memory than having to think about things.

This alludes to much of the research done about multi-tasking and getting distracted by the littlest of things.

I hate going to a virtual computer and not finding a file and wondering if this is one of the machines that hasn't been changed from the default so that it shows hidden files and folders. It would be nice to know that every computer, even a newly built one, has that open changed from the default.

Maybe I just need to trick out my nLite install and just make every new machine from a cloned image. I don't know.  :-\

[Follow Up]
I went through my bookmarks and found Tweakomatic. This may be a good base to work off of.

Stoic Joker:
If it's mainly VMs why not just create one base template vhd that always remains untouched, and then just copy it to a new VM each time you want to do some testing? That's what I do.

mouser:
I find that the biggest stress is just remember all the things i do to a system to customize it.
Keeping a good record of everything is 95% of the battle when it comes to configuring a new pc, at least for me.

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