Saturday, April 5, 2014

New Box

This post is coming to you from my brand new W-7 box, brought to you by Microsquash's reluctance to support a perfectly good OS (XP) any longer.

The good news is that the Mozilla apps can be transferred seamlessly using mozbackup. All my bookmarks, e-mails, folders and the like on Firefox and T-bird moved over with no problems.

The bad news is that XP has a program called Windows easy file transfer wizard that will move the contents of your old computer to your new one via a cable or network connection ot onto a solid state disk. W-7 has a similar program with a different name that works the same way, but labels files transferred to the HDD differently so it can't see the files transferred by the XP machine. So it's cables or nothing. What fun.

The description of the cables is nebulous enough to me that I'm not sure if a simple USB-USB would work or if I need something fancier with a nuclear booster box built into the middle. Guess I'll find out tomorrow.


6 comments:

Brad K. said...

I went directly from XP to Win8. A *lot* fewer problems than when I went from Win95 to XP. The "apps" tiles thing was annoying, but livable. (A year ago MS was offering Win8 for $40, until Jan 13, I think. It solved a problem my local garage-type computer guy gifted me with.) I also inherited a Win7 system, and I face the same "cannot connect" crap between the two. Win7 branched off in a dead-end direction that barely patched over the pitfalls of WinVista, and was stranded. Good choice, I think. Win8 is bloated, but mostly as solid as XP.

At least, this time I didn't have to throw away my printer, scanner, and camera.

I find Malwarebytes and Glary Utilities (both free) are both relevant and work great. I like Avast! on my Win8. I would be running it on the inherited Win7 desktop, but I cannot get AVG uninstalled. *sigh*.

Be sure to check Microsoft.com for their Windows Live or whatever the extra, unincluded utilities and stuff is for Win7. Some of it makes sense.

Oh, and you *can* run windows without the Bing search thingy. It randomly chose to slow my computer while searching (and reporting to advertisers) what it found on my computer.

Luck.

Billll said...

Everyone I have talked to says that W-8 works best on touch-screen machines, and W-7 is oriented towards desktops, which I have. Seems likely at this point.
All my outside accessories seem to have migrated just fine although I haven't gotten the HP scanning software moved yet.

Anonymous said...

Now you just need one of these:

Review: Dell’s Venue 8 Pro Is A Windows Tablet You Might Actually Want To Buy
Better hardware and software address worst flaws of early 8-inch Windows tablets.
by Andrew Cunningham - Feb 16 2014, 3:30pm MST


so you can blog from the bar, or shooting range, if they have wi-fi.

Micro Center in Denver frequently has deals on the 32 GB and 64 GB models.

jed said...

Bill, I transfered several machines at work from XP to W7 just fine using the easy transfer facility. You don't use the Win7 version as such. The xfer thingy on XP creates an executable on the target disk, which you then double-click on to run, when you plug it into the W7 box.

I used an IDE drive, hooked up with a USB adapter. Doesn't need to be a SSD. I have one of those adapters, and maybe even a candidate HD to use to do it with.

I also have crossover network cable, if you really want to try that route.

Billll said...

Jut ran the "easy transfer" program. Had to copy it from the 7 machine to the xp machine, but it seems to have worked. Programs don't transfer, but I expected that.

Anonymous said...

"Microsquash's reluctance to support a perfectly good OS (XP) any longer."

Why do you hate capitalism?

Microsoft needs to make a profit, and if that means forcing you to buy a newer operating system, so be it. Steve Ballmer's yacht isn't going to pay for itself.

If you don't like it, move to North Korea or Denmark.