Not@home wrote:
Jerry wrote:
My machine is old, 12 yrs to be exact. I do believe my hard drive is
dying. Wouldn't mind keeping my monitor, but would like to increase
memory,
speed, etc. And, specifically would like all my information put on
the new
system. I really like Outlook Express, but have heard it is not available
anymore.

In other words, I need some words of wisdom regarding what information I
should be looking for. And what should I steer clear of?

As you can tell I really lack computer knowledge.

thanks


I've read all these postings; quite a chore. But I want to set out what
I think I have learned. For my laptops, I have external hard drives
that I use for, among other things, backups. On this particular Dell, I
have a Western Digital hard drive, and have their software set to back
up everything weekly. Alas, I think all they do is back up the data,
and because I use uncommon software (Wordperfect, Seamonkey [son of
Netscape], F-secure AV, etc.) they don't seem to know where to put the
data when I ask for a restoration. So this charming Dell, which I
actually like, with Vista, has eaten two hard drives, and when I send it
for repair, they put in a new hard drive, and reinstall Vista, and that
is it. I am supposed to reinstall my programs and data, which is a
hassle, since I don't remember all my programs, and the restoration
service doesn't seem to work well. In anticipation that my current hard
drive will die before I do, I want a way to put my current setup on a
new hard drive.

It seems to me that making a disk image (which disks, C only, or C and
D?) with disk wizard, would be a good solution. I haven't looked for
disk wizard yet, it might even be somewhere on my machine. So my
question is, is this a good solution, and if so what is the best cloning
program for the unsophisticated, and where can I get it.

I did some more research. I found disk wizard at a Seagate site, but
buried in the manual was the caveat that it worked only if you have a
Seagate drive; crap. I then noticed that it is a version of Acronis
tweaked for Seagate, so I tried a search for Western Digital disk
wizard, and found another version of Acronis, tweaked for Western
Digital. Tomorrow I'm going to look for Toshiba disk wizard, since my
backup and my wife's pcs have Toshiba external hard drives.

I have only a 300 GB hard drive (I misspoke about my D drive, it is an
optical drive) and 1TB external drives. I had been using the external
drive to keep some data (pictures, music, word processing documents)
that I have no space for on my C drive, and for backup. So now I have
copied that data back to my C drive (it is stuffed tighter than an
unnamed politician's pants suits) in preparation to erasing and
partitioning the external drive, and using the disk wizard to make an
image in one partition, and storing my excess data in the other. I
think then I'll be in pretty good shape unless we have a fire. I've not
been comfortable about storing data in the cloud; it would protect me
from fire, but I worry about third party access. Maybe I'll eventually
make my own cloud in the garage.

Thanks for the information.