I think it's about time I do this. What's a cheap and easy way to do it? All I really care about is my songs, pictures, and videos. Are there other files I should be concerned about? I'm an idiot when it comes to computers so any help would be appreciated.
If you have a cd burner copy the files to a CD. If not buy a "flash drive" they will plug into a USB port just drag and drop the files into it and you are done.
I know I have a CD burner, not sure about the DVD burner but I think I do. I have a 12 GB flash drive but that's not big enough to hold everything. I guess I could put what doesn't fit on CD's? I've got about 2500 songs, almost 4000 pictures, and maybe 100 videos.
Get Carbonite at www.carbonite.com. It's brainless and it backs up your computer automatically in the background while you work/ play/ surf. Plus it stores your data offsite so if you ever had a fire or storm that wiped you out, you could download your entire original computer onto whatever new computer you purchased...same settings and everything. It's pretty cheap too. Only $54.00 per year.
With a program like ghost you can use an external hard drive and make a mirror image of the drive and if anything happens you can ghost (burn) it right back onto the old drive or new one if necessary. I would also suggest making several duplicates of picture, music, video, and document files onto good quality DVDs or other media like thumb drive, or media cards. or even a seperate hard drive. If you use DVDs use a good quality and keep them in good covers and out of the light, as they have a tedency to delaminate and degrade.
On a side note does anybody out there have a windows XP Pro cd? Mine has gotten scratched to the point its not readable, and I have been having problems getting one from Microsoft. I have a paid for license I just need a disc. My laptop came with Vista when it first came out and it sucks so I bought a copy of XP now I want to do a complete installation from scratch instead of using my backups and I need a disc. Anybody help?
If you go to the Microsoft website, there is information regarding a free upgrade this October to the OS that is replacing Vista. Vista is such a dog product (I have it as well) that Microsoft is giving the new OS to the poor saps who currently are stuck with it.
From what I have heard, Vista has been the single best selling feature for anyone considering switching to a Mac.