Moving from a very old PC

Has anyone had any success moving from an old PC to a brand new PC running W7?

Old PC: 1998 DEL XPS-R350 Pentium II, 512MB, Windows XP/SP3 (runs slowly !!! )

New PC: DELL Inspiron 545 running W7 Home Premium pre-installed.

Problem: I cannot find a satisfactory method of transferring my user files/settings from my old PC to the new one by any of the recommended methods.

The migration file is 9.6Gb. I got a Belkin 'easy transfer cable' which you hook into both computers, start the wizard and watch it transfer all your files over. It just sat there saying 'trying to connect' but never actually did till it timed-out.

Then I bought a 500Gb desktop external disk. I thought I could use it for backups and offline photo storage etc so it wasn't money wasted. However because its an old PC with old BIOS the disk size is limited to 137Gb max (addressing capability). So, it would not work on my USB 2.0 port. Doesn't appear in Disk Management tool although it prompts me to 'Safely Remove it' so XP sort of thinks it's installed.

Next I saw that USB Flash drives come in 16Gb sizes so I thought that would do nicely. Nope. They come pre-formatted in FAT32 format and I need NTFS format. Not a big problem since I could reformat it on my new PC. However both that, and the 500Gb disk, lock up my old PC when I install them so that nothing works. When I unhook those drives my old PC bursts back into life.

I'm begining to wonder if my USB/PCI interface board is faulty or can only handle files or transfers up to a certain size. If I connect my printers to those ports they seem to work OK.

My old PC has been running VERY slowly for the past several months, hence my decision to invest in a new W7 system. It could be that it has a latent fault, or it could be some other BIOS / system board / USB/PCI 1.1 to 2.0 problem?

I'm runnning out of ideas.

ps my new PC/W7 is brilliant. No bugs whatsoever so far.

/Ian

Hi loughlini & welcome to Windows 7 Forums

Have you considered a on line solution something like You send it > http://www.yousendit.com/cms/compare...FU0B4wodtGTfIQ there may be other solutions depending were you are

When I moved over from XP to W7 I just copied across all 'My Documents'; cookies; Favourites; and one or two other data files.
As both boxes are on my network, I just used that to get them across!
With the software, I either reloaded or bought latest versions (Norton, Office PaintShop Pro etc).

I had thought of using an online facility like BT Yahoo Vault but I don't want to set up a subscription for something I'll only maybe use once. Also being an ex-tecchie (steam computers) I'd like to know what the problem is and come up with an elegant solution just so I can sleep well at night.

Cheers, Ian

Another option is go via your router (network)

Does your old PC have a DVD burner? the files are only 9.6GB or 3 DVD's. always good to keep a hard copy somewhere safe...

Or you could take the HDD out of the old system and install it in the New one to copy the files over then take it out again...

Exactly what I would do if I ran into problems.

And for newer laptops the don't have a place for another HDD. USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA

Thats a great idea, i use a docking station but it is no good for ide.

http://www.win-star.com/eshop/goods.php?id=31

Well I finally got it fixed. Thanks to all who provided suggestions. I opted for creating a home network and setting up a shared folder to migrate my files & settings from my ancient DELL to my new PC.

I first tried to set up a homegroup but you are restricted to PCs running W7. My old PC had XP/Home so that idea was knocked out of play. I didn't want to spend any more money on new/updated interfaces for my old PC since it is destined for the Grundon.

I had used it as a standalone PC so no network was installed. In fact to save space on my original 8Gb drive (1998 remember !) I deleted some optional Windows components to save disk space - including client file sharing services. No wonder it took me all day to figure out why I couldn't create a shared folder

The W7 migration tool created a .mig file of 9.6Gb. However the transfer size was 18.2Gb. It clearly transferred itself as part of the migration process and had to be later deleted.

I am disappointed that an easy task did not work with the easy transfer cable or with a simple usb flash drive. However I did learn or re-learn a lot during this exercise.

Happy Christmas to all. All is well.