My PC is about 4 years old. It has a 5 GB harddrive that is almost completely full. It has a CD ROM drive but not a CD-RW as well as a 3.5" drive and USB ports.
I just received as an “out of the blue” gift a much more powerful notebook that I want to make my primary computer. The notebook has a CD-RW drive (but NO 3.5" drive) and of course USB ports.
What is the best (in terms of easiest and most reliable) way to move my documents and programs from the old PC to the new notebook? When it comes to computers I basically know how to operate them and load programs and that’s about it, so please “tell me like I’m four” and don’t worry about insulting my intelligence.
Depending on the OS software that you have, you could use the usb ports to create a LAN between the old and new machines and just move the files over that. You do NOT want to use the 3.5" drive.
Personally I would just connect the old drive up as a temporary slave. This should be possibly even for a notebook provided it has suffcient cables and the power supply will handle it. Just stick the drive on the desk and connect it up. Running the drive unanchored woldn’t be god for it long term, but as a one-off it isn’t going to do much damage.
Put them together on a LAN. Once you do this, setup a share on the desktop computer so you can access all the files on it from your laptop computer.
A quick search yields this site http://www.wown.com/j_helmig/guide.htm which appears to have a pretty thorough description of how to configure windwos for networking.
You also have to decide what you are going to use to connect your computers in a LAN. Fastest is ethernet - 100BaseT is cheap and fast, and most new computers have it built-in. Buy a ethernet card for your desktop ($10), then connect the computers (crossover cable $10, or a hub + 2 regular cables, $50).
USB can work, but it’s slow (especially pre-USB2). There are other choices - wireless, parallel port networks (i.e. laplink), serial null modem, smoke signals, etc. But basically, ethernet is your best choice, USB or wireless is second best, and just ignore all the rest…
Its not trivial to connect a desktop hard drive to a laptop. If you want to go this router, better to pick up a converter to mount the laptop drive in the desktop. Here’s one: http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=HD-108
It would work either way… you could easily remove the laptop drive, put it in the desktop and move files onto it.
The reason this was suggested is because it’s easier to get an adapter to put a notebook drive into a desktop than vice versa.
My vote is for LAN. Second choice would be USB transfer cable. I have a BUSlink USB file transfer cable that I got for an old laptop that didn’t have Ethernet. It worked very well, but it’s not as smooth as a network.
As a third option, you could get yourself one of those USB flash drives. A higher capacity one, say 256MB means you could swap files relatively quickly (5GB of transferred data = 20 flash drives full). No networking skills required…brain-dead easy to use. The added bonus is that then you have a flash drive, and they’re indispensible. You don’t know how much you need one till you have one.
If you get a USB 2.0 flash drive, you can at least make the upload portion of the transfer really fast. Assuming that the notebook has 2.0 ports. 1.x ports on the desktop are foregon conclusion…but one computer having USB 2.0, along with a 2.0 flash drive, would make things at least a little easier.
OK, go ahead. But first, here’s a few potential issues:
No spare IDE connector on laptop.
No easily obtained connector to hook up desktop drive on notebook.
Not enough power on laptop to spin up desktop hard drive.
Open up the notebook to overcome some of these problems, or jury-rig a connector incorrectly, and you risk frying the notebook and/or the drive.
None of these are huge obstacles, if you are insistent enough, but there is a real risk of damage if you, say, take apart the notebook and probe the motherboard looking for a spare IDE header.
All in all, I’d say it is easier to shell out the $4 for a ready-made connector that will allow the notebook’s hard drive to ride in the desktop. All you need, with your method, is to have both disks in the same host - you don’t really need to care what that host is.
As you can see by the various hardware options outlined above, none are trivial. And that just gets the two computers able to communicate, that doesn’t do anything for actually transfering the files.
You can’t practically transfer or copy the programs from one computer to the other. You want to install them on the new computer, which means you need the original CDs or download files from when you bought them. Just dragging the program’s files from “C”\Program Files" on one machine to the other will produce a disaster. Don’t try it.
The good news is you can do these program installations before you have to solve the problem of how to hook the machines together.
Once the two machines are connected somehow, you can copy the data from the old to the new, but it’s best to do that after you’ve got all the programs set up on the new machine.
I’m also gonna bet your new machine has XP and the old one has Win98. That means the names of various folders are different. “My Documents”, to name a biggee, is located in different places on the two versions of Windows.
Bottom line, there are a bunch of gotchas involved. You might want to find a local friend in the PC business to assist. You can spend days fouling everything up beyond repair, or let them spend a couple hours doing it right the first time.
For something in the neighborhood of $30 you can buy an external hard drive enclosure with a USB 2.0 interface. Just pull the desktop hard drive out and put it into the enclosure. Assuming the new notebook has USB ports and WinXP, just plug it in and it will be recognized.
You can set up peer to peer networks and all sorts of other things, but this looks like the best way to me.
Here is a typical example:
To top it off, you can buy then buy any standard hard drive or CD-ROM/CDRW and put it in the enclosure to use as a portable drive use on multiple computers.
I have used Intellimover when I got new machines. You need to have both machines with USB ports, or both with parallel ports. Moving to a new OS is no problem. Data and settings only, no programs. I think I got it at Best Buy.
The easiest option would be to buy a $15 USB ethernet adaptor and a 5m crossover cable. You dont need to open your case and you still get reasonable speeds. 5GB should be transfered in about 6 or 7 hours so you can just leave it running overnight.
UncleBill, thanks so much. I’ve been putting off buying a new computer because of this problem. I don’t understand any of the above, so I would be in trouble otherwise.
Cheaper: not unless you get a REALLY good deal on the CD-RW. The laptop surely already has an ethernet port, and I’d be surprised if the old PC doesn’t as well. If it doesn’t, you can buy a generic ethernet card for $10. A cable for a few more bucks, and you’re all set. (and not that CDR media are expensive, but you wouldn’t need that either)
Quicker: it wouldn’t be remotely as quick to use CDRs for the transfer if someone who knows what they’re doing is setting up the network. Since the OP admittedly doesn’t, who knows. OP: if you know anyone who can set up the LAN option, it’ll be much, much quicker than trying to do it with CDRs.
I’ve transferred 5 Gb or so using both methods (using CDRs on a computer where the network card was broken and it wasn’t feasible to install a new one), and the LAN method is much, much easier and quicker. The only difficult part is getting the software side of the LAN set up, and that can go both ways. I’ve done it a bunch of times, and sometimes it’s a three-minute job, and sometimes one or the other of the computers goes screwy and it takes a while to get it working.
