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#1
Most efficient/safest way to port files from XP to 7?
I am apologizing right off the bat for asking a question that has probably been answered, multiple times, on this board, but I have looked and can't find the answer.
My son is coming home from college in a week, with a newly-purchased Sony VPCCW290X, Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit, replacing his current Lenovo running XP Home. I'll be configuring the computer, and a big part of this will be getting the files and functionality synched up.
Obviously, I know I'll need to reinstall software on the new machine. I believe Office 2007 is the only paid software that is involved. Will it be an issue installing it on a new computer, when it's already installed on an old one? Otherwise, the main programs on it are freebies like Irfanview, PDFCreator, iTunes, Skype.
After the software is installed, 90% of the battle, I'm guessing, can be done by using the Windows Easy Transfer program. I have an external HD and will be copying files from XP to 7. And I assume that's pretty self-explanatory, but if it's not, please tell me any quirks to look out for. And at a minimum, I assume that this will bring over EVERY document for EVERY user on the old XP laptop, right?
Next, I'll want to make his Firefox profile on the new computer run FF exactly as it had run on the old one - same preferences, extensions, passwords. Will Windows Easy Transfer do this for me, and if not, how do I do it? I am smart enough to get it with googling/trial/error, but why reinvent the wheel since someone else here would have tried it.
Next, I'll want him to be able to use the shared printer we have at home. This printer is an HP Deskjet 920C (yes, I know, ancient) that is connected to an XP Pro computer, and shared wirelessly by the other computers in the house. Any special tricks to make that happen?
Next, I'll want to make it painless to connect to the internet. Configuring it to work on our home wireless network will be pretty simple I assume, as long as I can detect the MAC address on it. We have a Netgear G router at home, using 128-bit WEP, and suppressing broadcast of the SSID. I've added access to the network before when his friends and their laptops have come over, so I'm comfortable I can do it easily here, but I've never had a Windows 7 computer on the network before.
I'm more concerned about configuring it to "smartly" connect. By that I mean the old Lenovo had the "Access Connections" program on it. This would look first for an Ethernet connection and connect to the internet that way if one was detected, and it would then look first for the college WLAN and finally our home WLAN, connecting to the first one it found. He's not super computer literate - will he easily be able to configure for these when he returns to college? Do most computers - more specifically does this computer - have some type of utility to make this relatively easy?
Last, I'd like to be able to access the hard drive of the Windows 7 computer over our home network from my XP Pro machine. Is this easily configurable, and if so how?
Of course if there's anything I've missed here - again, the idea is to get all the files and functionality from an XP Home laptop to a Windows 7 laptop - please let me know.
Again, I realize that what I ask here has probably been answered elsewhere, so I will appreciate being patiently pointed to good answers to these questions.
Thanks!