No post tonight. The computer fairy came today and left me a new desktop!
Too busy setting it up and partioning it so the S.O. has her side and I have mine. So she has her programs and I have my porn programs. My desktop was over 6 years old and it was just not hacking it speed wise. Anybody got any suggestions for setting the old machine up in a network so I can still have use of its hard drive?
Skippy,
Insofar as your drive problem goes: depending on your operating system and installed equipment you can do a couple of things.
One: you can run the Network Setup Wizard and follow the steps to share material from your old machine with your new one. (This may be inadvisable if you store a large amount of personally identifiable information on the machine.)
Two: you can go to Fry’s or some other manner of computer (read: Circuit City and Best Buy may not have these) and get what is called a null modem cable. Windows XP has a Files and Settings Transfer Wizard which will walk you through the process.
Three: set up Remote Desktop Connection on the old computer and then use this to copy things from your old machine to the new one. (This is very inadvisable if you store a large amount of personally identifiable information on the old machine and plan on connecting it to the Internet later.)
Four: you can install the old hard drive in the new computer.
Five: you can have someone else (Circuit City, Best Buy, Fry’s, etc.) install the old hard drive in the new computer.
I’ll try to describe the whole process of removing and installing hard drives a little later. (Sort of pressed for time at the moment.)
As per Two…. The nearest Fry’s is in Atlanta
Re: option four — you could put the old HD into an external hard drive enclosure. Probably the most expensive DIY option, but you would get a (somewhat) portable hard drive in the end.
But the old machine is an XP machine. Don’t I run into problems with Vista?
VISTA? WAT? ONOES!
[flees]
There isn’t a difference between formatting (effectively how the operating system writes data to the drive) in Vista and XP. If you had been running Linux, then you’d likely have an issue since Windows doesn’t like reading the ReiserFS used by some versions of Linux.
(Which is sort of funny since my laptop dual boots SuSE 10.3 and XP, and I can read the Windows section of the drive from Linux, but not the other way around.)
I agree with august, I forgot the whole deal with being able to get USB kits for drives these days. Punching “USB hard drive enclosure” yields what you’re likely after. This (about $40-60) is the easiest option and will (as august said) give you a portable hard drive.