How to Transfer Files to a New Computer

Almost all of us have upgraded our computer to a newer one and faced
the problem of how to get our data transferred over to the new hard
drive. This is an important task to learn since you will probably need
to do it several times throughout your life. Probably the most helpful
piece of advice for anyone in this position is to understand your
operating system's directory structure. Once that is understood, you
have three basic options to transfer data:� Manually/Sneakernet
� Over
a network
� Direct connectionThe first, and most basic, method of
moving your data to your new computer is by using either something
like a portable USB hard drive or a USB pen drive. Plug the device
into your old computer and wait for it to install the driver, if not
already done. Look under My Computer, or Computer, for the USB device.
It will have its own drive letter, such as D: or E:. What I like to do
is double-click on it and position the window on the right-hand side
of my desktop. Next, I open my C: drive on the left-hand side, which
is my computer's hard drive, and if you're using Windows XP go into
Documents and Settings, yourusername. If you're using Windows 7 or
Vista, look under Users, yourusername. The vast majority of your
personal data will be located either under Desktop and My Documents.
Copy both of these folders over to your USB device. You may have to do
multiple copies if your drive isn't big enough to hold everything at
once. Alternatively, you may choose to burn a CD or DVD of your data.A
Second option is to simply copy your files over a network. Whether at
home or at work, probably the easiest way to do that is to temporarily
share your entire C: drive. This definitely presents a potential
security hazard but for the quick transferring of files it will be
okay. For XP, go back into My Computer and right-click your C-Drive.
Choose Sharing and Security, acknowledge the security warnings about
sharing the root (entire) drive and check Share this Folder on the
Network. On Vista or Win7, right-click the C-Drive and choose Share
with, Advanced Sharing. Check Share this folder. At this point, both
computers are sharing their entire hard drives. You may go to either
computer and browse your network for the other shared hard drive.
Simply drag and drop the files to your new computer from the old.
Don't forget to remove sharing when finished.The final method is by
using either a USB cable or a Crossover cable and hooking it up to
both computers. By plugging a crossover cable into each computer's
network port, you can transfer data without the aid of a network or
USB device. This can be quite tricky for the layperson to do so I
would not recommend it. You must launch a command prompt and type
ipconfig to determine each computer's IP address. Share your entire
hard drives, as detailed above, and press the Start button. In the Run
or search box, type \\ipaddressofothercomptuer\sharename. This should
connect you to the other computer for data transfer. A far simpler
method is through the use of a USB Transfer Cable. This just plugs
into a USB port on each computer to establish a connection between the
two. With XP you may need to install software from the CD that came
with the cable. On newer operating systems you need only follow the
prompts.As you can see, there are three basic ways to transfer files
to a new computer: manually, network, and direct. Each method has its
pros and cons. Things to consider are if you are on a corporate,
domain network, what version your operating system is, and your
experience level. In addition, think about how much data you need to
move and whether or not you need a backup copy when making a decision
about what method to use. The ability to transfer files between
computers is a great skill to possess.