Changing Computers (Part 8)
By: Mr JM
For my situation, it’s not as drastic as having to freeze the hard drive. And we have a home network to connect a number of computers so transferring the data is easier than having to copy things out to a DVD or CDROM.
Basic motherboard
What I did do was buy a new hard disk – we went to the local Computer Swap-Meet (a market where small traders get together once a month) and found a 500GB (GigaByte) SATA hard disk for eighty dollars. It is easily big enough to take all the data I want from the old machine with space left over.
Once I have the new machine set up with all my programs and information, I will clean my current computer and set it up with all the installation software and use it as a server for our network so we can store downloads there and backup our documents and data.
Then every so often, we write out files to a DVD in 4.5GB chunks and store them as extra backups.
The current task is to install the new hard disk in the new machine and get it formatted. Then I make sure the new machine runs on the network as it should and I can start copying the data over.
The first step in getting the new machine set up has already been done – I logged into the manufacturers’ sites and found Windows XP drivers for all the main bits of the computer. The place to start for this is on the Motherboard maker’s web page.
In the CMOS settings, entered by pressing [Delete] (or [Del]) on most machines, although sometimes it’s [F2] or [F1] you will find a motherboard ID or BIOS number. It may look something like RL86510A.86A.0089 on an Intel motherboard, which on checking on the site shows a D865PERL Main board. That will then lead to a variety of drivers to download.
The essential ones are normally onboard ones such as video, network and sound, but there may also be chipset drivers which will tell Windows how to ‘talk’ optimally to the hardware and can give a performance boost to the system
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