I’ve got a 3 year old Sony laptop that has started to develop a noisy disk drive. It’s got me worried that it will crap out sometime in the near future. Here I am a software developer and I have no backup strategy in place. ;-(
I have a nice Dell laptop sitting here that I can switch over to at any time. Problem is, trying to get all of those applications over to a new machine, with all of their related registry data, various DLLs and other runtime files, etc. And many of these apps have been updated over the web so I don’t have a set of CDs for most of the stuff.
Question - I wish I could just “take everything off of my Sony laptop and move it over to the Dell laptop, and keep going with what I have”. Is this really possible? It sounds unlikely to me - there is a different version of Windows running on the Dell, and I have no idea how to selectively move the right things over.
The more general question is this: How do people deal with the issue of upgrading their computers from one box to another box, and not lose a lot of “stuff” from their old systems or spend endless hours moving stuff over manually?
Many thanks…