Posted on 06/14/2005 3:25:00 PM PDT by kerrywearsbotox
Chicago, IL, Jun. 14 (UPI) -- Transferring software applications and files from old PCs to new ones is getting easier, because developers both in the United States and Europe are debuting new software and services to move content from one hard drive to another, experts told United Press International.
Up to now, most of the transfer of data and content has been done manually, at a cost that has been increasing by 30 percent per year, and at a time when companies are attempting to rein in IT costs, said Simon Yates, senior analyst at Forrester Research in Boston, a consulting firm. By Gene Koprowski
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Transferring files is not difficult. I'd like to see a program that would transfer programs, including operating systems to another computer. The operating systems manufacturers wouldn't stand for that. A lot of license agreements preclude changing to another computer without buying a new operating system.
How easy is it to transfer email files from one hard drive to another?
For later review.
If your running MS OL its a piece of cake. Do an export to a *.pst file and just walk it over.
It's not too tough to do that. Just need disk imaging software like PQI or Ghost, get everything setup, make an image, transfer the image to a different computer, restore the image. So things that license based on a code from the CPU have problems, and of course the OS will be incredibly twitchy if there's a dramatic hardware difference, and if you're on a network you'll probably smack into computer name collisions. But it is doable, and if you're careful about how you do it the process can be relatively painless... relatively.
Oddly enough, as a computer consultant that is one of the things people ask me to do all the time.
Given that the computers can talk to each other (a side issue that one could spend days explaining), its often very painful to transfer mail from one machine to another ESPECIALLY if the mail client is some version of outlook or outlook express. Microsoft provides no clear way to do this, but there are a bunch of third party software (some free) that will do that for you.
Just finding the mail (where it is really stored on the drive) is problematic under XP or win2k. Once you find it getting it to the proper location on the target machine is just as problematic. This is made worse by the tendency of outlook users to leave gigabytes of crap in their email folders because "they might need it again".
My general advice is to avoid both Outlook and Outlook express like the clap, because they both are very insecure and nonstandard mail packages. There are dozens of free packages that are easier to use, more standardized, and have export/import capabilities to and from other email packages, including Outlook.
The first problem is getting the machines connected. Once you can see the other machine in the network neighborhood you can google up mail transfer solutions.
Walk in deed. And bring all the viruses and spyware that Microsoft subjects you to in the process.
And you solution is incomplete, as it will not always work and fails to get some data some of the time.
Always works for me and I have done it hundreds of times.
Only a noob wouldn't sanitize his inbox and save infected email.
Oh I forgot...some folks never miss a chance to bitch and moan about MS...silly me.
Other programs probably have similar files but I don't know about them. If you post your system information someone here will surely help.
What's hard about it now?
Those "somethings" are a real killer if you want to transfer the XP operating system. If you can convince Microsoft that you have a legitimate reason for changing to another computer they may give you the authorization code. Older operating systems are easier to transfer but you may still have to install the operating system again or at least run MS repair to make it work.
I use Ghost for my backups. If I stick one of those in a computer other than the one from which it was cloned there are various problems. It's always better to do a clean install of all programs including the operating system then transfer the files you need. It's time consuming but you get a cleaner system.
In the case of identical computers, have they ever heard of 'Ghosting'?
When I want to transfer files I just type in the Start/Run box in Windows:
\\computername\c$
This will put you on the root of the other computer's C:\ drive in Windows Explorer.
Then browse through and copy over whatever you want. Both computers have have access to the same network to do this, but I sure don't need an application to do it lol.
Can photos from your cell phone be transferred to your PC?
Last time I bought a hard drive, it came with software that bascially copied my old hard drive onto my new one.
Oddly enough XP never gave me a problem with that transfer. Some automation testing software gave me fits but XP was smooth.
One thing to always make sure of is the drive position of the boot partition. If you make an image from a machine that has a BIOS tool partition so the partition you're worrying about is number 2 make sure it's number 2 on the new machine even if you have to fake up a pointless 1 meg partition in front of it.
bump for later reading
I was going to say, if you don't know what you are doing, it's much more difficult.
I have my company set up with roaming profiles. If a workstation crashes, the user can walk over to an unused PC, log in, and continue as if nothing happened.
This happened last week, in fact. Total hard drive failure. It would be even more painless for me if I baked up an image of each PC, but this would, over the long run, take more time than just reinstalling Windows and Office on the new drive, and logging on to the server, which automatically synchronizes all the mail and documents.
Considering we have less than one drive failure a year, I think the few hours spent rebuilding a broken PC is less than the time it would take to make (and continually update) a ghost of each PC.
Easy...
set the old harddrive as the seconday on the same channel...drag and drop into a new folder on the new harddrive...
I do this all the time when I backup the home machine...
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