How to Have a Successful File Transfer to a New Computer

When you get a new computer, you face the challenge of trying to do a successful file transfer with data that is stored on your current computer. It's a challenge that you often don't even realize or stop to think about until the new computer is set up and booted for the first time.

If you're a graphic designer, writer or home recordist, your life's work could be sitting on that machine you just stuck in the corner. Even if you're a casual user, there are key bits of data stored on your old computer that you may wish to rescue and carry forward into the new machine. Just about everybody uses e-mail and has built up an address book of names, or perhaps you have a calendar of daily activities, a list of Internet favorites or important documents or creative works such as family photographs. Maybe you have the more mundane but certainly very important financial records or tax data on your old machine.

Moving Programs
As a rule, you can copy data (documents, stored e-mail, photographs, etc.) from one machine to another, but you must install programs (Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, Quicken, etc...). What does this mean? It means that if you used Microsoft Office on the old machine you will have to install a copy of Microsoft Office on your new machine from the original product CDs in order to access the data files that you moved. If you used Quicken on the old machine, you will have to install Quicken from an original product CD onto the new machine, etc. Your application programs and the Windows Operating System need to be "aware" of one another and this awareness is created during the installation process where both your program and Windows are modified to make them work together. The same goes for the Mac OS.

Think of it as though you were shopping at the grocery store with a child. You have a list of specific items that you are going to buy and have budgeted only enough money to buy the items on the list. Items that are on your list are like programs that have been installed into your OS from original product CDs. Windows, for example, keeps a list called the Windows Registry, and Windows "budgets" system resources such as disk space and memory for these installed programs.

Now let's say as you shop, your child also places items into the cart that aren't on your list. This is comparable to you copying a program from an old PC to a new one without going through the installation routine from original product CDs. No system resources are allocated to the program, and support files located in unusual places, such as the System folder, aren't there. If you copied a program from your old machine to your new one without going through the proper installation process, your OS will not run those programs because they're not on the shopping list and no system resources have been allocated to them.

So how does one bridge this great divide? With key data locked away on the old machine and the new machine begging to be used, how do you go about moving all your data and programs from the old computer to the new one? For starters, think of it as two operations. In operation one, you should install all the programs on the new computer that you want to use from the old computer. In some cases, this will be easy, as you may have ordered your new computer with current versions of those programs already installed. In some cases it will require you to chase down your original program CDs that you installed on your old computer. In some extreme cases, your older version program may not be compatible with the newer version of Windows and you will need to go out and buy a newer version of the program to install on your new machine.

Moving Data
In the second operation, you are going to move your program files and data from the old machine to the new one. Start by sitting down at the old machine and make up a list of items that you want to move. If there are other people that use the computer, include them in this step as they may have created their own folders and you don't want to have to go back in the future to do this again. Of course in any given folder there may be far more than you actually want to carry forward. Few of us are good about housecleaning on the PC, and that old tennis club schedule from 1997 can probably safely be deleted at this point. Think of how you used your old computer and what you most often used it for.

Now you've got a choice of how to get those files from your old computer to your new computer. If there isn't much to move, consider using a flash drive or burning them to CD, remembering that it's always a good idea to back up important files.

If you're moving a lot, like that giant MP3 collection or several thousand photographs, it's easiest to link the two computers together with a USB cable, Ethernet crossover cable or FireWire cable, if FireWire is supported. FireWire is the fastest way to move files, USB is the slowest. In both of these configurations, you'll be connecting your old computer to your new computer as an external hard drive, then moving the files directly.

To move files via Ethernet, you'll need a specially designed Ethernet crossover cable, which has its send and receive lines crossed, allowing it to connect two computers directly without an Ethernet hub. This creates a mini network between the two computers, allowing you to browse your old PC and move files as if it was on a network. This is a fast way to move files, but you may need to spend some time setting network preferences on both machines to make it work.

Article provided by Homesteader