Setting up my new HP 7-1010 computer was easy and it worked perfectly on the internet an hour after I carried the box into my home, but then the problems began. The problem today was transferring twenty years of data accumulation from my past onto the new Terabyte hard drive. It would make sense to move the old hard drives physically into the new computer and thus to wire them directly into the new system, but that had two problems in this particular case.
The first problem was that the hard drives were possibly causing the crashes and eventual death of my old computer. Those failure were probably caused by dirt accumulating on critical motherboard parts, because vacuum cleaning and blowing had improved the performance twice, but there may have been something more, that is the hard drives, and even though this was a 64 bit machine it was quite old and a newer HP machine was much more powerful.
The second problem was the huge amount of legacy accumulation of, who knows what, files from years of simply viewing long forgotten stuff. So, what seemed the best way forward was to keep the drives totally out of the new computer, leave them external and transfer only those files known to be valuable to me personally. That included lots of photographs. The early photos were made on one of the very first Casio digital cameras, and they now look very fuzzy, compared to my new 16 megapixel Samsung. Those early files don’t take up much space on the new Terabyte hard drive. That is the kind of personal data worth transferring, but along the way there were old movies and lots of music, which isn’t worth transferring because it isn’t personal information and it can probably be gotten from the internet.
It turned out that the 500 gigabyte hard drive was IDE, for which there I already had an external USB data transfer cable, which is shown in the photograph transferring data. The newer 750 gigabyte hard drive was a SATA, so I went over to BestBuy and spent $29.99 on a SATA to USB transfer cable. That data transfer will take place tomorrow.
The problem was where to get the electric power to run the hard drive, so it was set on top of the old computer and hooked up to the dead mother-board’s computer transformer cable. That worked fine. With so much data to transfer it seemed prudent to hook up a computer fan to blow on the working hard drive, which went for a couple of hours. It needed lifting so air could blow under it, and a hard candy mint was placed under each corner. It was all jury rigged, but it worked okay.
Moving data between hard drives is easier than it was a decade ago.