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A bit of background here: my old "main" laptop, Orac, has been a faithful companion. However, I purchased him in about 2011 or thereabouts, and he's getting on for a bit of electronic hardware. Recently he had the electronic equivalent of a stroke - started needing to check the hard drive every time he booted each morning, and went from taking about five minutes to boot to taking something like fifteen. It was time for a replacement.
So I went looking around. Now, Orac is a laptop with a fairly large screen, but even so, this is not a huge amount of screen real estate, so I decided to get a proper desktop machine this time around (I want a screen I can actually read without needing to pull out a magnifying glass for fine print). Which led me to the all-in-one machines, and to the Dell webpage, where they were having a 20% off sale a couple of weeks back.
Say hi to "Slave" (because I'm keeping the Blake's 7 naming trend going, but since this is a lower end machine, it's certainly not Zen). Slave has a 24" screen, which is a real shock after years of working on Orac's 17". All of a sudden I can see more than four tiles across in the file manager, and my Scrivener workspace is so much bigger.
Of course, I'm dealing with the standard problems which come with things like getting a new machine set up - namely the software install two-step, and the whole fun business of transferring over a bunch of bookmarks which are stored on the hard drive of one machine to the hard drive of a different machine (I swear, one of these days, I'm just going to give up and do a quick & dirty P2P nyetwork with a bit of Cat5 from the old machine to the new one and copy things over holus bolus), as well as setting things up and configuring them so they make sense again. Which has eaten seriously into my plans for the day (which originally started with things like "finish up a couple of assessments so I can at least go at my gaming on Saturday with a clear conscience").
One thing I'm learning today: my old-fashioned mindset where I don't trust a hard drive I can't physically access to hit with a hammer is not helpful when it comes to migrating PCs these days. In order to be able to physically migrate files, you have to know where they are (and what they look like) - Firefox doesn't come with a nice, neatly labelled file saying "bookmarks", and Thunderbird doesn't seem to have anything politely labelled "email archives" either. Plus it looks like Yahoo isn't going to accept me using POP mail any more (damn it) which on the one hand means I always have a backup of the files on their server... but on the other hand, means if they decide to take away the server, I lose all my email. Mumble.
Oh well, new schmick toy, nice big screen. Just got to download the Steam client and give it a reboot, and we should be home and hosed.
So I went looking around. Now, Orac is a laptop with a fairly large screen, but even so, this is not a huge amount of screen real estate, so I decided to get a proper desktop machine this time around (I want a screen I can actually read without needing to pull out a magnifying glass for fine print). Which led me to the all-in-one machines, and to the Dell webpage, where they were having a 20% off sale a couple of weeks back.
Say hi to "Slave" (because I'm keeping the Blake's 7 naming trend going, but since this is a lower end machine, it's certainly not Zen). Slave has a 24" screen, which is a real shock after years of working on Orac's 17". All of a sudden I can see more than four tiles across in the file manager, and my Scrivener workspace is so much bigger.
Of course, I'm dealing with the standard problems which come with things like getting a new machine set up - namely the software install two-step, and the whole fun business of transferring over a bunch of bookmarks which are stored on the hard drive of one machine to the hard drive of a different machine (I swear, one of these days, I'm just going to give up and do a quick & dirty P2P nyetwork with a bit of Cat5 from the old machine to the new one and copy things over holus bolus), as well as setting things up and configuring them so they make sense again. Which has eaten seriously into my plans for the day (which originally started with things like "finish up a couple of assessments so I can at least go at my gaming on Saturday with a clear conscience").
One thing I'm learning today: my old-fashioned mindset where I don't trust a hard drive I can't physically access to hit with a hammer is not helpful when it comes to migrating PCs these days. In order to be able to physically migrate files, you have to know where they are (and what they look like) - Firefox doesn't come with a nice, neatly labelled file saying "bookmarks", and Thunderbird doesn't seem to have anything politely labelled "email archives" either. Plus it looks like Yahoo isn't going to accept me using POP mail any more (damn it) which on the one hand means I always have a backup of the files on their server... but on the other hand, means if they decide to take away the server, I lose all my email. Mumble.
Oh well, new schmick toy, nice big screen. Just got to download the Steam client and give it a reboot, and we should be home and hosed.
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I come by my distrust of "cloud" sharing systems second-hand - my partner spent a while working for one of the providers who did such things locally. Then again, I spent about five years working in the tech industry myself...
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I did manage to connect the old and the new using a USB cable and then I transferred most of the files that way.
I also found having an external drive with my large libraries (music. sooooo much music) made life much easier.
Good luck. Enjoy the quick boot time.
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The only tricky bit with switching that over was remapping all the default locations to point to the external drive so that I'm not constantly copying files from the hard drive of the computer to the external drive and vice versa.