As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been trying to use Microsoft’s Windows Easy Transfer utility to move 100Gb of files and settings from my old laptop to the new one, but between technical glitches and thunderstorms, it still hasn’t completely worked. When the initial estimate ballooned up from a few hours to nearly two days, I started to suspect things were not going to go according to the script . . .
Today’s plan is to do it in two stages: back up the old machine’s files to the NAS, then install the files from the NAS to the new laptop.
I’ve always had much better luck doing it in small stages – when it asks if you want to transfer software, do one package at a time.
When you get massive groups of files, that sort of software gets confused.
Generally, though, it’s often faster to do a clean install of the major programs, like Office.
Comment by cirby — August 1, 2011 @ 17:15
Sigh. Yeah, that might be the way I have to go anyway. Today’s Plan B just crapped all over itself: at some point during the Windows Easy Transfer, the NAS appears to have become inaccessible to the old laptop, so the session failed.
No time to fix it tonight, and I’m on the road tomorrow, so it’ll be the weekend before I can address the situation again. Arrgghh!
Comment by Nicholas — August 1, 2011 @ 21:57
The one time I tried the MS solution to move ‘everything’ to a new computer I could not make it work either.
What I do now is
– export bookmarks from FF.
– export passwords and etc from FF.
– copy ‘My Documents’ to NAS
And call it a day.
The Mac .. it’s easier. Up until this last machine I’d moved ‘up’ four times from the original machine and it just kept moving ‘stuff’ no problem.
The last machine I opted for a fresh install. I found I had oodles of cruft on the old machine, didn’t like the idea of moving apps that I no longer used to a new machine.
Comment by Brian Dunbar — August 2, 2011 @ 15:16