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Thursday, March 15, 2012

Gettting something old on something new...

I got a new laptop computer a couple of days ago - a new, state-of-the-art, whiz-bang laptop with the latest Windows 7 operating system on it. I had held off as long as I could. Even though my old Windows-XP based laptop was still runing good, it was starting to show its age, especially on newer, more memory intensive apps. It had 1.5 GB of memory, which was a lot when I got it, but which pales next to the 8 GB of the new machine.
So, I've spent the last two days discovering which of my old apps will still run on theis new machien and which I have to buy again. Since this is a 64-bit machine, there are many old drivers and apps that just won't move over and run. At least it came with a stripped down version of MS Office on it.That wold have been another major $ hit to replicate.

Just moving all of the data from one machine to the other can be a fun challenge. And then there's the email and Internet bookmarks stuff. Bookmarks proved much easier to move that I had imaged; however, moving email files between my old Outlook Express environment to the new Microsoft Live Mail environment has proved to be a big challenge. Most other apps have Windows 7 versions, even if I have to pay for a license again.

Adding printers has been interesting, too. Fortunately I had upgraded my home print environment to a new HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 a couple of months back, so that worked out well. The offices that I work in during the week proved to be a different challenge, since they both have lots of older printers that don't have Windows7 drivers. I was able to find enough updated drivers for both sites to keep me going.

In addition to figuring out how to get all of te apps that I use regularly to work, I'm still trying to learn how the new MS Office 2010 apps all work under Windows7. What fun it is to upgrade when you've skipped a generation or two of Windows. I'll let you know how it's going from time to time.

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