our PC's new best friend

Our vintage HP desktop is about on it's final boot up. We bought it about 2000, maybe 2001. I think the C drive is about to die. That won't be good, as the C drive is all the applications. There is a separate D drive, with all the data. So about two weeks back I call up to Dell and buy a new Inspiron 530. I spent this past weekend, installing our few programs onto the new computer. I attempted to remove the old D drive, but it isn't compatible with the new hardware! I talked over some options with a friend of mine who does desktop support for a living. He thought there was probably some wire connections to install the vintage D drive, into the new computer.

I decided to use a service that we were already paying for. Carbonite. I'd signed us up about a year back. What it does, is back up the files and folders to the Carbonite off site storage. So once I got the software installed, I hooked up the new PC to the Internet. I downloaded more programs and fixes and patches. Then, I went to the Carbonite site and logged on. I then told it "this is now my machine". Carbonite then walked me through the steps to recover all our data from their back up site! I didn't choose the "do it all" option, as I wanted to control which files were downloaded and where they were placed. Mainly because I knew it would run a while and the D drive, didn't exist on the new VISTA machine. Saturday I did all the small files and folders. Saturday evening, I let it do all our documents. Saturday night, I let it do our photos. It was done when I got up Sunday morning. Sunday evening, I let it do our largest file, the My Music. Something over 13 GB. It was done when I got up this morning.

I've only got a few new issues to deal with.
1) figuring out how to get the new printer shared, so our work laptops can print at home.
2) I messed around with a file after I recovered it. I can't see it now, but the computer knows it is there someplace..... When I try to copy it back off my flash-drive, the new PC informs me that it already exist and do I want to over lay it.
3) ITunes. About 113 songs were "protected" on the old machine. The new Itunes didn't want to "convert" those. I've done some searching and have a few tips to try and get those songs into the new machine. Worse case sounds like "burn them to a CD on the old machine, and then slam them into the new one".

Anyway, Carbonite worked just great and copied all our data down. Get Carbonite on your desktop.