Date   : Mon, 06 Jun 2005 22:00:09 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: GoMMC versus hard drive. Which way to go?

On Mon, 2005-06-06 at 22:34 +0100, BeebMaster wrote:
> I know what you mean about serial transfers!  On a slightly non-related
subject (although it least
> it gives me a chance to moan about Windows etc which is always good for
the mind) I found it
> absolutely impossible to transfer my data from my old Win 95 laptop PC
(with no CD drive) to my new
> Win XP desktop machine.  Clearly nobody at M****soft has ever thought
it remotely likely that
> anybody would ever want to transfer data from an old machine to a new one.

Does interlink for DOS not ship with XP? It was definitely still around
in the Win95 days but I've hardly ever used XP so I don't know what its
DOS support is like. 

That'd work over a serial line, but SMB-based networking should work if
you have a network card for the laptop. I've definitely copied data from
a Win95 machine to a modern Samba server; no reason why it shouldn't
work to an XP machine though.

My main gripe about Windows is the way data's splatted all over the
place (config files etc.) and often mixed up with binary content too
(and worse still, the location of it isn't even documented for most
apps). Makes it very hard to know *what* needs to be copied between
Windows systems when upgrading. At least with Unix-based systems it's
normally a case of doing little more than backing up /etc and any home
directories...

>  There is no support at
> all for anything like this and the only way I could do it was to use
Win HyperTerminal which can
> only transfer one file at once.  So I had to zip the entire hard drive
on the old machine and send
> it over as a single file to the new machine via the serial link at something
like 19200 baud which
> took 28 HOURS!!!!!!!!  Good old Bill Gates, what a genius.

For the reasons above, copying the entire drive is probably quite a
sensible plan anyway :-(

On-topic: I'd love Linux drivers for my EcoLink board so I could
transfer stuff from a beeb that way... 

seeya

Jules