assistant

Be the Ultimate Assistant: A celebrity assistant's secrets to working with any high-powered employer
$14.95
The Ultimate Assistant by Bonnie Low-Kramen was detailed enough for those of us who really are looking to continue as Executive Assistants. It emphasizes the importance of intelligence, thinking and getting jobs done without much help and just really working hard to research tools needed in a job that you are really on your own to do. It is all about working independently and using all resources including other key people to get the job done. I like the great examples of doing unexpected jobs and the "out of your way" challenges and hurdles that come up and have to be overcome in order to get it right for the executive. That is the true challenge of good executive assistants. To find a way no matter how.
I liked how the book is spersed with interesting and valuable inspirational quotes between chapters. It's a good book to keep at hand and reread.

Become An Inner Circle Assistant
$19.95
This book so far has exceeded my expectations. It's well organized and extremely useful. I've picked up some great tips on time management, mirroring the boss' behaviors when necessary, dealing with email, interruptions, etc...

I love it! I'd recommend it to everyone who's in the workforce. It's a treasure I'll read over and over.

Be a Kickass Assistant: How to Get from a Grunt Job to a Great Career
$19.99
This is a great resource for anyone interested in getting a start in the world of administrative and executive assistants. The book's packed with the basic information needed to be successful in this field. It's even a good review for the experienced assistant.

Laplink PC mover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant
$29.99
I was upgrading from Vista x64 Ultimate to Windows 7 x64 Professional. I purchased the Pro version of the Win7 upgrade knowing that I would have to reinstall all my programs. The lack of any real value in the Ultimate version of Vista convinced me that my money should not be wasted a second time on Win7 Ultimate.

Unfortunately, Microsoft views this as a downgrade as far as option levels go, and there is no supported upgrade path. I hoped to save myself some trouble by trying this product. If nothing else, it was only $10 - This is a deal if it does exactly what it claims, and not too hard of a mistake to swallow if it doesn't - I wouldn't have lost anything but time and 10 bucks.

I DID however create a backup image of my disk drives before starting with Active@ Disk (another product). Just in case, even though the product stresses that you should NOT at any point in the process format your hard drive partitions. This is a side by side fresh install.

To start, you create your moving van file of the programs you wish to migrate, then it gathers the information and creates a restore file. It was a lot of stuff, but completed quickly. In part because it's not really moving anything at all. All it's gathering are registry keys and config files. It does ask that you save the file to a location that will be accessible to both the old OS and the new one. I chose an external Seagate disk drive.

I also printed out the manual for the Vist to Windows 7 upgrade process, (it was all of 18 pages) and followed the instructions during the upgrade process.

Then I started the Windows 7 Upgrade. Chose Custom install, but didn't format anything, and the upgrade began. The old Windows directory became windows.old. So for anyone wondering that makes this a 'clean install' in that sense, but PC Mover does capture program registry settings and imports them afterwards.

After the Windows 7 installation, I took a moment to check that all my devices were recognized and working then reinstalled Laplink and ran the restore using my moving van file.

It does ask questions such as user account migration, but I had named the new account the same as the old. It did get upset about the "size" of my files that would be "restored". I assume that this feature, and how it counted the size of files being restored was a throwback to the full LapLink product. It told me that it would be restoring 235 GB of data and I only had 215 GB of storage available. I told it to continue anyway, and it only took up 17 GB more of hard drive space.

Some users might have been confused or alarmed by this. The screen should have been customized for this purpose and been coded to give an accurate count since the whole idea behind the product was that you don't reinstall anything, you just import it into the new OS. It hardly added any more to my drives - probably the exact amount taken up by the new OS.

Well, aside from that, it worked. Exactly how it said it would. To be clear, I didn't have to reinstall ANYTHING, except Laplink's PC Mover itself and Kaspersky Anti-Virus, but I had to install the new version of that anyway for Win7 compatibility, so I lost nothing there. The program screens make it abundantly clear however that programs that require activation may have to be re-activated. This was true - Adobe PhotoShop, PaintShop Pro and other programs that required an activation key needed to have the key re-applied.

The product also has a safety feature called Start This! that runs after the installation is complete. It disables any services that were migrated to your new OS and gives you a chance to allow or remove them.

The only other quibble I have with the product is how it migrated my Documents folder. Win7 treats the Documents folder (and sub folders) from Vista as Libraries. PC Mover made a fair guess at placing my files in the correct libraries, but goofed in a couple of places.

In truth, if *I* had been more familliar with the Library system I would have sorted it out sooner, but I wound up in my ignorance deleting files that appeared to be duplicates that were not. I restored them from my Active@ Disk backup and was fine.

In all, a good product and deal for a single PC upgrade. If my system were not set up and just the way I wanted it, I may not have bothered with this product. But if you want to do an unsupported (by Microsoft) Windows 7 upgrade, this is a good choice.