It's about time to upgrade to a new computer. My old desktop is about 5
years old and only has 1/2 gig of ram and a 60 gig HDD, although I
haven't even used half of it. I'm going to get a low end desktop box
because my home computing needs are pretty modest, mostly web surfing
and a the occasional word processing, spreadsheet or PP application.
I'm not doing video editing or gaming, so I don't need a high end machine.
A few of the on line retailers still sell XP machines for a couple
hundred bucks, less monitor. However, the local Fry's has a weekend
special on an E Machines PC with everything I need for $249 (after the
inevitable rebate), with Vista.
A couple of questions. I have everything on my current computer backed
up on a 500 gig Maxtor USB external hard drive. If I get a Vista
machine, can I plug the Maxtor in and drag and drop the My Documents and
the Program Files folders (or at least the sub folders in Program
Files that have the apps I normally use, like Office, etc) into the new
Vista C drive?
The other question is security. I run current Norton on my desktop
machine and I'm pretty sure it's clean, but you never know what kind of
sneaky malware is hiding on your machine. If I pull files and
applications off my Maxtor drive, am I taking a chance that unwanted
malicious files could also hitchhike? The alternative would be to load
the apps on the new machine manually, but for some, like Office, I no
longer have the disks. (I do have a DVD for Office 2007; tried it;
hated it.)
Thanks
Dave C
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