Hi all,

I havent been in here for quite some time because i was busy with my office moving to a new building.

Anyways, here is my doubt.

My boss's laptop is old and it's slowly dying. We're going to replace it with a Brand new laptop. My boss wants to take the image of old laptop(with Norton Ghost) and restore it in the brand new Laptop so that he does not have to reinstall the programs he has. I know that there would possibly be problems restoring the image on a different hardware. But my question is whether it is a good idea at all to have an image of old one in the new one. Are we carrying the problems that couldve been there in the old laptop to the new laptop too?

Thank you in Advance.

neora

This post has been edited by neora: Feb 5 2007, 06:06 AM

Your biggest problem is Windows XP and it's 'Product Activation' anti-piracy measures. When you transfer XP from one PC to a different one (by whatever method) it will detect different hardware and will therefore "de-activate" itself.

In any event, if your boss's 'old' laptop was pre-installed with Windows (ie an OEM version), the OEM licence does not allow you to transfer it to another PC, even if it was possible to do so.

Presumably the new laptop already has Windows installed on it. That is the one you must use.

This post has been edited by pip22: Feb 5 2007, 07:11 AM

Horrible idea. Even if you ignore the licensing issues your new laptop most likely will not boot. If by some miracle you get the OS to boot you'll spend untold hours scrubbing old drivers and installing new ones. Plus you'll never know if you have it right. You'll be debugging the "swap" any time a problem occurs that doesn't have an obvious solution.

A clean install of all your applications on a fresh OS is the only way to go. You need to have a good backup of your data anyway, so do the backup now and save yourself the headaches later.

hmm ya... this old laptop is the one that had(still does a times) driven me crazy with user authentication over VPN... i had posted on that here and had endless discussions with dsennette who was very kind in helping me figure out weird problems. And therefore i do not want an image from that old laptop to be installed into a new clean laptop(pip22.. this new laptop comes with XP). I just wanted to make sure(get a second opinion on this matter) that i wasnt being too paranoid.... system administration drives me crazy... argh! but i guess that's the fun part

thanks ppl.... I would also like other ideas on this... anything else you know and would want to please let me know...

thanks again...

edited: double post

This post has been edited by neora: Feb 5 2007, 07:52 AM

I agree to everything that was written before but would like to add, in general, about the subject: When you ghost a drive you get an absolutely identical copy, up to the last bit. And here is the great advantage and the great drawback of ghosting. If you have any problems, of any sort, on the copied disk, you take all of them with you to the new disk. Even without the problem of moving windows to another computer (which, in my opinion, cannot be practically overcome) I wouldn't keep a ghost of your boss's computer at it's present condition. It would be a good practice, however, to reinstall the new computer and then ghost it for future recoveries.

hmmm ya.... i guessed that too... Now i need to figure out a way to convince him that it is a better idea to reinstall everything... hmmm

Eitherway, you boss must have a install copy of all the programs he needs to do his business because all harddrives have a life span and if he is trying to save money by transfering programs even if it worked(most cases not) still the moment that harddrive died he would then have to go looking for the program.

btw I am curious to know how the laptop is dying, because if it is not the harddrive then an external harddrive caddie costing peanuts could make the job of transfering important data to new computer easy, that is if you extract the harddrive from the old laptop placing it in the harddrive caddie it become like a big USB key, thranfering data to the newlaptop means you have two copies of the data too, and as long as you understand that neither harddrive will live forever, having mirror copies of data on two harddrives means it is safe enough, and it works out far easier than copying everything to DVDs which you then cannot change and renew

This post has been edited by fleamailman: Feb 6 2007, 04:08 AM