On Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:25:39 -0500, "HeyBub"
wrote:

Stormin Mormon wrote:
A fellow I know, but never met. He's got two computers.
Desktop running XP, and laptop running Vista. He wants to
copy a couple gb of files, from one to the other.

So far, he's been copying some with a flash drive, and dump
them onto the other computer. It's taking a long time.

Suppose he takes a USB cable, from one computer to the
other. Would each computer show up as another drive, to the
other? Use windows explorer to click and drag and drop? Send
the data through the USB cable.

And what if one of the computers was turned off? Would the
USB cable provide enough power to spin the other drive, and
allow the data transfer?

I don't think so. Even if he could, USB connection speed is terribly slow
for that sort of thing.


The better way is to network the two computers. Each PROBABLY has a network
port built in, so it's merely a matter of a cat-5 cable connecting them and
following the steps outlined in the networking wizard.

Yes, I hadn't though of that or the router (EVen though just tonight
for the first time it occurred to me if I want to have a second
computer, I should network them.

Of course the instructions are in geekeze, so he'll need the help of a
12-year-old male.

LOL, but true.

An alternative, assuming both can access the internet and he has a
high-speed connection, is to use the 8-or-so Gigabyte storage offering of
Google Mail and send the files as attachements from one machine while
retrieving them with the other machine.

Isn't that still slow because the email protocol is slow, including
for attachments. I was always told not to email programs for example,
because they are long, but to ftp them to webspace, and then have the
other guy ftp them back down. File Transfer Protocol. There are free
ftp programs if this comes up a lot. (Sometimes urls use FTP without
you're asking them too, especially those heirarchical libraries I used
to see. Browsers seem to have what they need to handle ftp for the
last 15 years or so. But you still need a separate program to access
private webspace with no webpage or software surrounding it. Like
what your ISP offers you. It's like you can put up bookshelves and a
card catalog, to help people get what they want, or you can just put a
book there with an address named after your book, your file. I don't
do any of this. )

In addition, you remind me, it surprised me to find out there are real
issues in emailing attachments. A friend has a Mac and I would sent
to him two files every week or so, one .rtf and one .htm . Each file
had a standard font and a fairly rare one. It turned out, he coould
read the .rtf pretty well, but not the .htm files. And it turned out
his file length was a few hundred bytes shorter than what I sent him.
I think maybe the missing bytes had held the second font information.
I think maybe some special character in the file was treated as an end
of file marker, but I never found out. The problem seemed to get bad
when I switched from win98SE to XP, even though my email program was
the same, exactly the same, still running from the C: partition
(Because Eudora doesn't really get installed in windows. It just has
to sit there)

During testing, I decided to try Outlook Express to send the files.
When I sent the same files to him, and the opposite was true. The
..rtf file was bad and the .htm file was good. Even when I sent the
files to ME and read them with Eudora, that was true.

I thought attachments were always exactly what one sent when they got
to the receving end, but it seems to be much more complicated.