[ale] Partially OT: moving apps from old to new PC's (non-Linux)

[James P. Kinney III]

On Wed, 2004-03-31 at 17:05, griffisb at bellsouth.net wrote:
> If you were migrating a small office, would the first list of actions be the best bet? Can Ghost backup a running PC and transfer to a different PC and give you a working system?

1. Inform them that nothing but the files they generated (word docs,
spread sheets, etc) and their browser bookmarks will be able to be
transfered.

2. Install Openoffice and instruct in how to use it to open all their
old word files.

3. Set up their new system to use Mozilla or Firefox as their default
browser. Set up their email to use Mozilla or Thunderbird as their
default. Merge in their old address book.

4. Park their old machine(s) near a network line so that when they
remember the file they put in that weird folder that they didn't move
over, it's easy to get at.

5. If the new machine has a big hard drive and the old machine is a
small one, copy the old drive into  a folder on the new machine. Or
better, partition the new drive to include just enough space for the old
stuff and make the partition read only.

The windows registry can (and will) cause loads of problems if a ghost
image is dropped onto a new pile of hardware. The drivers won't work,
etc. and the new drivers will need to be installed. Adding new things to
a windows machine is bad enough from a stability standpoint. Removing
things is courting disaster. Most old software had really bad uninstall
tools and left all of the registry crap (best case) intact or (worst
case) half removed.

-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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