My fastest computer transition ever

[Bob Womack]

My old Dell Inspiron 1545 Laptop with Vista was beyond "long in tooth." Its motherboard-mounted power jack had become extremely unreliable, even after a repair, leaving in question whether it would wake up with a charge at all and its WIFI was horribly slow. It was beginning to be a sad thing to operate. Soooo, it became time to replace it. After I spent a month or so of research my lovely bride marched me down to a dealer and we picked up a new Surface Laptop (8g/256g)*and a one terrabyte USB hard drive to make the transition and serve as the family backup and the backup for my website.

I spent about forty minutes backing up the needed files from the old computer to the bridge hard drive via the older USB 2.0. That was all hastened by two things:
1. I use Mozilla Thunderbird email client and it has a feature that shows you exactly where all your configuration and email files are. You simply copy one folder to the bridge hard drive then copy back off to the appropriate location on new computer and point Thunderbird to it. Boom! All your accounts and mail are waiting for you.
2. I use Mozilla Firebird browser and keep my bookmarks, passwords, and add-ons in the cloud. Once I downloaded the browser and logged in, everything dropped right in.

Anyway, everything was in the computer and settled within about three hours. We are talking about all my music, photostream, etc., and downloading and installing all the needed programs including my antivirus and the FTP client I use to access my website. That's everything except for Microsoft Office, which I'll probably be loading tomorrow. I'll need a passcode from work to take advantage of a Microsoft program that allows employees of companies that use Office to purchase it for next to nothing for home.

I'm just amazed at how quickly and painlessly the transition happened. It was very much akin to the transition I did to my wife's new iPad a couple of weeks ago. Seamless, painless, off we go.

Bob

[Bob Womack]

Oh, I also upgraded from the installed Windows 10s to Windows 10 Pro.

Bob

[KevWind]

I did not realize that USB drives come in 1 TB config. 3.O I assume ? Guess I am behind the times

[Bob Womack]

It is a spinny type hard drive that runs on USB voltage. It is indeed USB 3.0 but is also backwards-compatible to 2.0, though slower. It is like a rocket on 3.0 and slower on 2.0. I actually wanted a smaller drive but that's the smallest one they had in stock and it was on sale for very nearly the price of a drive half its size.

Bob

[fazool]

Every time I do a hardware replacement, I plan on a full weekend of transferring and setting up in the background.

So nice to hear quick success stories.


I use Google drive for everything but music so, similar to Mozilla, the transfer is nice and seamless.

[robj144]

Originally Posted by KevWind

I did not realize that USB drives come in 1 TB config. 3.O I assume ? Guess I am behind the times

They come in sizes much larger than that. I have a 8 TB USB for backups.

[mdunn]

I back up all the photos and video I shoot. The originals are in various external drives from 250GB, 500GB and 750 GB drives plus (1Buffalo 1TB) & (3) 1 TB LaCie Drives. I have 6 TB in my Dell Workstaion. And, the double backup is four 5TB Seagate and three 4TB Seagate Backup Plus drives for a total of 32TB of storage. At this time not all the Seagate Backup drives are full.

When I ran the initial backup to the Seagate drives it was a lengthy job. Even with USB 3 set up

[Bob Womack]

And an update: I backed up my entire website to the drive on Saturday night. It took a bit but now I'm current. Monday I purchased the Home Use Program version of Office through my company and installed it. It was a bit clunky but quick and complete. Now my only issue is the following:

The computer came with a complimentary year's subscription to Office but I didn't want to get into a subscription, knowing that I could have it with perpetual updates for single payment through the enterprise program at work. Once I got the installation done I'm finding that every time I load an Office product it reminds me that I need to activate the free subscription that came with the computer before it goes out of date. I can close the reminder but would prefer to not have it pop up. First world problems. I removed the "Get OFfice Reminder App" but this is coming from somewhere else. Oh, wel.. Everything else seems to be working fine.

Bob

[Frogstar]

I do appreciate how easy Thunderbird makes it to migrate to another machine.

I gotta say though, are you still actually using Firebird? They switched away from that name quite a long time ago (I started using it back when it was Phoenix, and they had to change the name because that was taken, switched to Firebird, which it turned out was also taken, and has been Firefox ever since)

[jhmulkey]

It's still amazing to me to think about how storage capacity has expanded so much over the years. Our family's first PC (in the true sense of that term) was an Apple IIGS with no built-in storage. Our next PC was a Gateway tower with a whopping 4GB HD in 1997.

[ManyMartinMan]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

... I'm just amazed at how quickly and painlessly the transition happened. It was very much akin to the transition I did to my wife's new iPad a couple of weeks ago. Seamless, painless, off we go. Bob

There are a couple of things that have improved in the past decade.

[Bob Womack]

Originally Posted by Frogstar

I do appreciate how easy Thunderbird makes it to migrate to another machine.

I gotta say though, are you still actually using Firebird? They switched away from that name quite a long time ago (I started using it back when it was Phoenix, and they had to change the name because that was taken, switched to Firebird, which it turned out was also taken, and has been Firefox ever since)

Whoops. Firefox. "Manual auto-correct," ie. brain fart.

Bob

[rlb9682]

Originally Posted by mdunn

I back up all the photos and video I shoot. The originals are in various external drives from 250GB, 500GB and 750 GB drives plus (1Buffalo 1TB) & (3) 1 TB LaCie Drives. I have 6 TB in my Dell Workstaion. And, the double backup is four 5TB Seagate and three 4TB Seagate Backup Plus drives for a total of 32TB of storage. At this time not all the Seagate Backup drives are full.

When I ran the initial backup to the Seagate drives it was a lengthy job. Even with USB 3 set up

I've been moving all my backups to SSD (solid state drives) lately; living in a warmer environment, traditional Hard Drives don't last more than a few years on average. I've had my original SSD for 8 years now and it's still running without any hiccups

[Song]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

And an update: I backed up my entire website to the drive on Saturday night. It took a bit but now I'm current. Monday I purchased the Home Use Program version of Office through my company and installed it. It was a bit clunky but quick and complete. Now my only issue is the following:

The computer came with a complimentary year's subscription to Office but I didn't want to get into a subscription, knowing that I could have it with perpetual updates for single payment through the enterprise program at work. Once I got the installation done I'm finding that every time I load an Office product it reminds me that I need to activate the free subscription that came with the computer before it goes out of date. I can close the reminder but would prefer to not have it pop up. First world problems. I removed the "Get OFfice Reminder App" but this is coming from somewhere else. Oh, wel.. Everything else seems to be working fine.

Bob

Bob I don't know if this is what you mean but... https://www.howtogeek.com/226321/how...on-windows-10/

https://www.bing.com/search?q=How+to...16&FORM=CHROMN