Mr E

If the machines are identical then why not just swap the hard disks over?

If you don't want to do that then you need to use a program such as partition magic or similar. You can buy a connector that would allow you to mount a Laptop hard drive on a normal machine then you can take a copy of the disk and then copy it to the hard disk of your other machine.

As regards the memory, you can now get notebook RAM up to at least 512MB / card so you should be able to increase your RAM but check what your machine will take.

Even if your two machines are the same model there will probably be differences at BIOS and component level so your old settings may not be right for the new machine.

Mr Euro, unfortunately drivers are often different between models, because the display/sound/network card can be different... I'm afraid that to be sure the only way is to use the disk provided with the new machine and load your data from the old disk.

Thanks Optimist. I could just chnage hard drives but there is nothing on the new one, well, apart from the basics; XP etc.. it will work but to rebuild my programmes, data, etc.. would take me weeks.

If I understand you correctly I need to go through a desk top? Problem is the only one I have is 10 years old ! I have 3 notepads and about 10 monitors :-)

Thanks.

Mr E

Mounting the disk in another computer is certainly the easiest way. On some laptops (not many) you can fit a second hard drive.

Perhaps someone who is more familiar with drive imaging programs can suggest another way.

Win XP pro has a facility to export programs and settings. I only tried it once (from W2K) but was less than impressed with it.

Before you start transfering data, make sure that you can restore your new machine to its original state.

Help please. Outlook Express stops responding everytime I try to open my Sent Items box. Everything else works fine. Any ideas?

kernow, do you have a very large mail in your sent box or in the outbox? OE might just be trying to send it and taking a long time?

Spaceman - nothing in outbox and only 39 routine items in sent box - nothing large. I cleared it of junk last week. Strangely I can search for items in sent box and they display - but not the whole box contents.
Can I delete Sent box then recreate it perhaps?

Kernow, I would not delete sent item, can you move all the mail out of it and put it somewhere else than see if you still have a problem?

I dont use OE but I would try an "clean up now" from the maintenance tab, its probably worth saving any important mail.

Spaceman - already did the Clean up. I think the problem is now solved - I renamed the sent items folder then restated OE which created a new sent items folder I can access. I've lost all the old sent items though. Thanks for your time/advice.

Spaceman - you were right - sent items totalled 49mb!! Downloaded a .dbx reader and weeded it.

whats the best way to copy music CD's to keep them on my hard drive,
then i can make copies of my fav tracks etc onto one disc,or two for my car,
i want to sort of make a juke box on my PC,(back-up PC with 160 gig hardrive,1024 MB mem)

steve

Use Windows miedia player and select copy from CD (or RIP if you have WMP10)

Oh when are my computer problems going to end! Shut down as usual last night, no problems at all. Fired up today and moving the mouse sends CPU usage to 60%, open anthing and it shoots to 100% and shuts down.

Have started via F2, last good set-up, and still have the problem. No process is running over 20,000 k. Any ideas anyone??

Thanks.

Mr E, have a loot at task manager and see what processes are using CPU (click on CPU heading and it will sort in that order) the screen will jump about a bit but if you watch for a while you should be able to see which procs are running and usisng CPU.

Post them back here.

Hi Spaceman, System idle process = 97/8, but in terms of memory usage it is only 20K. The largest 3 processes by usage are:

waol = 22,404K (0 CPU)
SVCHOST.exe = 20, 072K (1 cpu) - no idea what this is?
explorer.exe - 16,872 k (0 cpu)

Thanks.

Me E

When the CPU usage shoots to 100% does it shut down ie. Blue screen or does it appear to freeze? In which case, if you leave it long enough does it recover?

What programs are set to run on startup? On my system the only thing taking more than 15,000K of memory is Internet Explorer.

Hi Optimist, in seems to have done all you have described! It has shut down the system (it reboots if I start) but normally it restarts to where it shut down.

Mr E

Is this your new computer? Did you copy everything accross from the old disk?

System idle process near 100% could be a driver problem, possibly grapics or motherboard but there are plenty of other possible causes.

If it shuts down then that suggests a dodgy power setting or something overheating but System idle process shouldn't be effected then.

Um, Whats Waol? is AOL your ISP?

But I thought CPU was going over 60% has the problem gone?

Not sure about this one, could be browser hijack? do you have adaware or spybot?

O, you got any more ideas??? ;-)

Optimist, confused I would expect system idle to be high?