

First figure out how much stuff you're taking with you (2 GB? 10 GB? 100 GB?). Think of moving to a new computer like moving to a new house. "But I wasn't going to let the machine win." "The amount of time it took to get everything the way I like it was ridiculous," she recalls. But she was also humbled by the work involved in the data transfer from her old PC. "It's so much faster than my old computer," she says. She's impressed by the performance of her new laptop. Our own Popular Mechanics assistant editor Erin McCarthy recently switched from a three-year-old Dell laptop running Windows XP to a new Intel-based MacBook running OS X Snow Leopard.
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Whatever your situation, make sure to allot a decent amount of time to the process (it can eat up a full weekend).
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Plus, the longer you've waited since your last computer upgrade, the higher the chances that software you've grown accustomed to may not transfer at all. That means that one's personal files may amount to a multi-gigabyte transfer that requires both capacity and organization. The days of throwing all of your files on a floppy disc or even burning them to a CD are over.Ĭomputers are now often our main repository of music, photos and even movies-which have both sentimental and real monetary value that may exceed that of the computer itself. But if it's been four years or more since the last time you migrated from one computer to another, you'll find that the logistics of moving have become far more complicated. So now is a natural time to think of upgrading to a new computer. Apple's new version of OS X, Snow Leopard, along with a host of updated desktops and laptops, has introduced plenty of innovation to the Mac platform, as well. In fact, the past year has brought us new operating systems from both Apple and Microsoft. That has largely changed with Windows 7-a system that, although not a complete reinvention of Vista, is a vast improvement in terms of performance, reliability and usability. Microsoft's last-generation operating system was so widely ridiculed that a whole generation of PCs running the previous OS, Windows XP, was kept in service long after the hardware had become creaky and outmoded.

Windows Vista was, if anything, an excellent excuse to hold on to an old computer.
