Upgrade advice needed

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My old man mentioned at the weekend that he is thinking of buying a new computer, his is a fossil machine! but he's running Win 98, and he would need to transfer some files to the new computer.

I said he could either back up the relevant info to a cd through windows, or even put the old drive into his new machine to get them off.

I need to know if he goes option 2 will he be able to access the files if his new system is running XP? if he can will it allow him to transfer them? and is this the most difficult option for him?

 

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I would say that option 2 is the most difficult for him, in that have has to move the drive from A to B and set it up as a slave. If your gonna do this for him, I think that would be the best option. He gets extra disk space and doesn't have to touch his file's, they can just stay where they are on the slave.

Also, with accessing files, there shouldn't be any problems providing that you have the program to open them with on the XP machine. The only problem I can see arising from that is that some programs are only forward compatible, and not backwards compatible.

So once he update's some of his files, he would not be able to open them with older versions of the software, due to the new format. However, this only happens with certain programs, and it would depend on what programs and versions he uses currently.


HTH

Andy

 

What type of files are they? If they are media as in pictures or music it would be very easy to stick them on a CD, depending of course on how many files there are. If it's files like Word documents same applies, any newer Microsoft version will open similar older verions ie: WinXP Office Word will open Win98 Word documents no problems. It just doesnt work the other way around.
If you mean he has files saved using something like AutoCad you would need to make sure the version of AutoCad he has works with XP as well, as he would need to install it on the new machine. I would be suprised if it never worked.
Hope this helps or is indeed relevant to your question, I would be more specific with the type of files and hope one of the mods has a look at it.

 

I agree with all the above, the files, if general day to day word docs, pictures etc shouldn't pose too much probs - like MrNice said, unless he is using "specialist" software, there wont be much of a problem.


Personally, I think it would be good experience if you put the old HDD into the new PC for him and did the transfer that way. Another option would be drop a NIC in the old PC (I assume the new one will have onboard LAN) and grab yourself a bit of networking practice from the situation.

btw MrNice - I believe you can take most MS Office docs from modern versions, and old versions (ie Office 97) will still open them. I certainly done this a few times, but that was just .doc, and .xls - dont know about any of the others.

HTH