Setting-up Your New Computer

Setting-up Your New Computer: How To Move Your Old Files To Your New Computer 
You've got a new computer for your office. It's cleaner, better, faster and you can't wait to start to use it!However, your satisfaction of making a fresh start with a new computer is tempered by the fact that all of your "stuff" is still on your old computer. Everything that made your old computer YOUR computer: your personal settings, your business files, your company spreadsheets are still loaded on your old computer. You find yourself with a new computer that's not so great without a whole lot of the useful file information that is still stored on your old computer. How are you going to get all of that information onto your new computer? The process is called "data migration" and it can be a tedious and time-consuming task for you and your business. 

Here are some suggestions to make this data migration go a little easier for you. CDs One option is to copy ("burn") everything to recordable CDs. Blank CDs are cheap, at about $1 apiece, and can hold more than 600 megabytes each. That much storage space should be enough for most small businessess to transfer old data files from one hard drive to a new. Two drawbacks to the CD method of data transfer are that: ~ It may take a while to burn each CD and ~ That you may not have a recordable CD drive on your old PC. 

Recordable CD units are standard on newer PCs but if older computers have a CD unit, it was insatlled as later add-on hardware feature. Thus, depending on the age of your older computer, it may not have a recordable CD drive installed at all. To install a recordable CD drive on your older computer now, may be more of a time-consuming effort when compared with other alternatives to moving your data files. Portable Drives Iomega has a pre-packaged solution designed to bridge the gap between old and new computers. They offer a software "moving kit" for individuals who have recently bought a new computer with Microsoft's Windows XP.