This Shouldn’t Be This Difficult!!!

I got a new work laptop to replace my old work laptop. My old work laptop has served me well over past three years and really doesn’t seem that old — in fact, it’s still the second fastest computer in our house, second only to my new workstation. The new laptop however is by far the fastest we now “own”. Its 3ghz, dual-core processor coupled with 2 gigs of RAM and a zillion other bells and whistles ensures that it’ll be the “king of the proverbial road” around my place for quite some time. I’ve had the new laptop for about a week now but haven’t started using it yet. The problem lies in getting my old stuff onto my new computer.

My old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 8500, has a 40 gig drive and is almost full. The new laptop, a sleek Dell 620, has a 120 gig drive. Work is pretty strict about making sure our computers have the official standard image on them, so I thought the simplest way to do this would be to use some sort of ghosting software to transfer the image from my old laptop to the new laptop. I’ve spent the past three days trying to do this. The problem lies in the fact that the architecture between the two machines is so different that the image that works on my old laptop won’t work with the new one. After blasting multiple errors to the screen the old image on the new laptop simply blue screens.

Giving up on Ghost, I moved to Acronis’ backup suite. I first tried True Image Server, which didn’t work. I then moved to True Image Workstation, which was able to backup the old laptop but still not create a bootable image on the new one. I found another product, “Universal Restore Utility” (also from Acronis), which promises to allow you to backup and and restore images between different hardware families (EXACTLY what I am trying to do). Of course, it didn’t work. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I can remember a time when I was actually good with computers …

After three days of frustration, I give up. I reghosted my laptop with the standard work image earlier today, and will spend the next week trying to dig up copies of the dozens (if not hundreds) of programs I had installed and start trying to recreate my work environment. Sigh.

One thought on “This Shouldn’t Be This Difficult!!!”

  1. This is a very easy problem to fix, actually and there is absolutely no reason that you’d need to reinstall everything.

    ‘Ghost’ works fine – any drive imager will do. But what you need to make it complete is a copy of Microsoft’s “sysprep” (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=838080) which removes the architecture/driver dependencies that you have on your install of XP. After you’ve sysprepped the old laptop, shut it down and ghost the hard drive. Then it’s just a matter of exporting the image to your new laptop and booting. Make sure you have tons of drivers for that laptop on a CD or something though, because XP will want ’em.

    That, or get a Mac.
    :)

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