I’m writing this post from my brand-new computer. It’s an HP EliteBook 8540w, and as far as I can tell it’s great. I haven’t had much of a chance to put it through its paces yet, but so far it seems like a nice machine. (64-bit quad-core, 8GB RAM…computers have come a long way, haven’t they? I remember being proud of 128 MB RAM…) Switching computers can be a very painful process, but I wanted to post about something in Windows 7 that made it a little bit easier: Backup and Restore. The Windows 7 Backup feature copies all your important files to a external drive – a CD/DVD, external hard drive, or a network location (for Windows Professional & Ultimate). You can either pick files and folders yourself, or let Windows choose. I used an external hard drive, and let Windows select the files. The initial backup took about an hour and a half (not bad for 22GB worth of stuff), but when I refreshed it, it only took about 10 minutes. Once the backup was done, I hooked up the external hard drive to the new computer and used the Restore function to pull all the data over. When it was finished (in maybe 15 minutes, I wasn’t really watching), my desktop and all my Libraries were just as they had been on the old machine. It wasn’t perfect (it seems that even the best automation rarely is). I had to set up a few things in Outlook, and re-adjust some system settings, but I don’t think I’ve ever had an easier transfer. Sadly, Backup and Restore can’t re-install all my programs for me…I’m off to finish that up now. :-)

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