congereel
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Moving contents of one laptop to another.
I recently bought a new laptop.I want to transfer the whole contents ,programs, data,etc,from my old laptop to my new one.What is the best way to do this? Both have XP home.
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I am assuming that since you just bought a new laptop both machines will not be the same build. So it would not be wise to copy all your programs directly from one system to the other because they will not be registered properly and you'll encounter all sorts of problems.
The way I see it you have 2 options. Copying over your data files from the old laptop to the new one will ensure that all your important files are retained. But you would still be left with installing all your applications on the new system.
The other option, as Eagle6990 has suggested is to use a program like Norton Ghost to make an image of your old laptop's hard drive and load that onto the new system. Because your laptops are likely not the same builds, this may not work properly due to the hardware abstraction layer. Going from a pentium III to a pentium 4 for example with different chipsets might cause you problems. At the least your systems would be using different drivers so you would likely have to have those handy after ghosting in case XP doesn't identify them.
To sum it up, the easier way would be to try running ghost, but it could be messy. The cleaner way would be to reinstall your programs and copy over your important data and settings. This could be accomplished using simpswr's suggestion above.
My personal recommendation without knowing your system specs would be to go with option 2 and reinstall your apps and copy over data. If you could provide the system specs of your old and new laptops that would help in determining if ghosting would work well or not.
The way I see it you have 2 options. Copying over your data files from the old laptop to the new one will ensure that all your important files are retained. But you would still be left with installing all your applications on the new system.
The other option, as Eagle6990 has suggested is to use a program like Norton Ghost to make an image of your old laptop's hard drive and load that onto the new system. Because your laptops are likely not the same builds, this may not work properly due to the hardware abstraction layer. Going from a pentium III to a pentium 4 for example with different chipsets might cause you problems. At the least your systems would be using different drivers so you would likely have to have those handy after ghosting in case XP doesn't identify them.
To sum it up, the easier way would be to try running ghost, but it could be messy. The cleaner way would be to reinstall your programs and copy over your important data and settings. This could be accomplished using simpswr's suggestion above.
My personal recommendation without knowing your system specs would be to go with option 2 and reinstall your apps and copy over data. If you could provide the system specs of your old and new laptops that would help in determining if ghosting would work well or not.
ASKER
What about a backup program such as Nero6 has copy to cd or dvd?
you can backup files with it, but not installed programs
ASKER
So far so good using the files and transfer wizard. I have not encountered any problems I cannot fix as yet.
I suggest a program like Norton Ghost to copy everything over as an image file.
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=50231516&pfp=srch1