Transferring data to new PC

[Thorin]

I'm thinking of taking the plunge to purchase a new machine with MS Vista Home Premium on it (not an easy decision believe me !!).

But I have a huge amount of data left on my old machine that I will want access to on my new machine.

I have two issues that I wonder if anyone else has already gone through and solved.

1) I was think of removing my two hard drives and then installing them as slave drives on my new Vista machine.

2) I may install Virtual PC to use old O/S to load older non-Vista supported software on to.

Has anyone here done either of the 2 above ? If so did it work Ok or did you have problems ?

 

[Norie]

Andy

I recently took this step.

At first I was going to try and install the old drive into the new machine, but get this - I couldn't seem to fit it in.

This was a standard desktop machine so I was probably missing something - not too hardware savvy.

Next someone suggested I get a IDE to USB device/cable.

So I did that - Vista hated it.

So as a last resort I opened the machine and connected the old hard drive externally using the power supply that came with the IDE/USB thing.

Again Vista didn't really like that, but eventually I was able to get the old files on to the new machine.

All I wanted was the files, eg workbooks, word docs etc, not any applications so I can't really comment on non-Vista supported software.

 

[ExcelChampion]

Recently I purchased a laptop from HP (TX1000z) with Vista. It's been an absolute nightmare.

I'm not the only one either. Do a search and you will see the same issues (won't power down, won't hibernate, won't resume, etc).

I don't know about Dell, but as for HP, it is absolutely ridiculous that they released these machines with these problems. And you can't tell me that they didn't know about the issues before shipping to consumers. A simple test of, "Ok, let's try to shut down the machine. Ok, now let's try to hibernate. Ok, now let's try to resume from hibernate." - all of which would have failed.

So, in my opinion, as far as HP, DO NOT BUY FROM HP. They are a shady bunch of criminals.

Now, as far as Vista - it has some issues. But MS seems to be on top of actively working them out. And personally, I really enjoy using Vista. There are some very nice features. As far as software incompatability, I've come across only a few (AVG, PDFCreator, help files for old XLM4.0 macro language)...everything else works just fine.

As far as transferring files, there is a Belkin wire connector that is specifically made to transfer files from XP to Vista...if that helps.

 

[Norie]

Todd

If the problem is old help files you can download Win32.hlp (not sure if that's the exact filename).

When you try and open an old help file you should get a link to do that.

 

[ExcelChampion]

Thanks for the tip Norie. I'll give it a go.

 

[SydneyGeek]

Andy:

I have an external hard drive so my strategy was:
Copy from old PC to external drive
Transfer from external drive to new PC

The process took a couple of hours but was painless.
As for Virtual PC... I installed it on the new PC and set up a 4 GB virtual disk with XP Pro installed. I run Office 2003 inside here, and some other stuff that won't run on Vista. No problem, except you need to transfer the stuff you are working with from the Vista C: drive to the virtual C: drive. Otherwise, things get unstable.
You can set up a Vista folder that Virtual PC sees as a Z: drive. Anything in here can be transferred between Vista and VPC.

Todd:

I'm using AVG Free on Vista. Works fine.

Denis

 

[Richard Schollar]

Andy

If you get a new PC but your old drives use an IDE interface rather than SATA then it's worth bearing in mind that many recent motherboards only have the one IDE socket (so you can run two IDE devices one as Master the other as Slave). That's OK, but SATA DVD/CD-ROM drives are uncommon, so you may well find the DVD drive is occupying the IDE slot so you may not have anywhere to connect your old harddrives...

 

[Thorin]

Some good points, my idea was not only to copy my old files, but then use the older drives as backup devices only. They are IDE drives, which are currently "daisy chained" off of one IDE socket, but its a good point Richard, I will have to investigate this with Dell before I purchase.

The Dell machine comes with 320mb of HDD as standard, so its not a space thing, but I like having a seperate drive to backup my data to.

Denis, you had to install Office 2003 in the Virtual PC environment !! I thought Office 2003 was Vista compatible ?

 

[Richard Schollar]

Denis also runs Office 2007. Whilst I find Excel 2007 and xl2003 co-exist happily, Access 2003 and Access 2007 are a different kettle of fish (my Access 2003 is not a happy bunny any more, altho the 2007 one seems to work without problem) - I believe this is why Denis uses the virtual PC environment.

 

[Thorin]

Ah right, I'm not currently planning to use Office 2007, but its worth remembering for the future.