A case of the lunatics taking over the asylum. I upgraded my laptop to have a Win8 machine for testing and could not quite believe how bad it is. One example: rather than include Acrobat Viewer they have written their own. OK but if there's way to print the PDF you're looking at (just the sort of thing you might want to do if someone sends you a PDF email attachment) I can't find it. For all the jokes in the past as to why you press the Start button to stop your computer, at least there was a pretty obvious way of doing so. Not in Win8
And, yes, I know there are various third party offerings to 'fix' Win8 but a good few users of my software will use it as it comes so I have to feel their pain :)
That's not my experience. 2k to XP usually works well if the 2k installation is clean and some housekeeping is done first (defrag, uninstall unused apps, run a registry cleaner, etc.) I find apps don't need reinstalling afterwards, and it's an idea to delete as much as you can from Device Mangler to force 2k to install native drivers for the hardware.
Also worth checking if the FS on the boot drive is FAT32 - a conversion to NTFS is well worth it - at the command prompt:
convert c: /fs:ntfs
XP is basically 2k with a teletubby interface - it's practically the same under the hood.
XP to 7 is another story - had some success on an XP with minimal apps installed, but an older, more complex setup didn't work well. You can't go direct - you have to upgrade to Vi$ta first.
I hit another ruddy snag! In addition to making a TrueImage image, which I have now completed, I wanted to copy certain folders from the W2K drive to another drive across the network using straightforward copy in Windows Explorer. But WE has this bloody irritaing habit of stopping (aborting) if a file cannot be copied. From the web, someone described the problem admirably:
"When copying many files, the copy function aborts if a file cannot be copied, leaving the user unsure of which files have been copied and which ones have not.
This is a big failing of Windows Explorer and it is the reason I changed to FreeCommander, but I am disappointed it has the same weakness. There are other (better) programs that will skip a problem file and continue to copy the rest of the selected files."
Well, exactly that happened to me. I set the copy process running at around midnight, then came back just now to see that it was stuck on a particular file. Clicked OK, copying aborted, and now I don't know which files were copied and which not. Stupid Windows!
I've already tried several 3rd-party programs, mainly shareware, that all leave a lot to be desired. TeraCopy is the latest and its interface is horrible. Another program, Advanced Data Copy Tool, didn't seem to do anything in trial mode (so how is one supposed to evaluate it, then??!!). Looks pretty, but totally useless.
If anyone has a suggestion for copying complete folder trees and/or individual files and for the copying to continue even if one or more files can NOT be copied for whatever reason (and then list at the end the files that failed), I would be pleased to hear it. I could knock something up in Visual Basic, but what the heck?!! Just to get a bunch of folders/files from one PC to another? Crazy.
Although it's rather tedious, because it does a byte-by-byte comparison, you can see what files are different or absent between two folders using WindDiff, which comes with both the 2k and the XP Support Tools packages, on the XP CD in the Support\Tools folder (choose complete installation to get Windiff), and also IIRC freely downloadable from MS as an individual tool, assuming that you can actually find the download.
Ah, good, there are some more to try. Since I installed TeraCopy, which is free for non-commercial use, it does seem to work, though the user interface is extremely poorly designed.
Maybe you can, but maybe it is something that looks like Windows but it will either not activate or get clobbered by Microsoft for licence issues at a later date.
I've got a few copies of XP from ebay a few years back that are still in their shrinkwrap, with hologram stickers, but Microsoft wouldn't let them be activated. These packs were Microsoft branded XP, not some vendor/platform specific version). They passed ALL the visual check procedures. They look as genuine as any other genuine version.
I got my money back and kept the goods. The problem with supply of the OS was fixed by alternative methods.
Dunno whether SyncToy has to be installed on BOTH computers (source and destination), but if so it wouldn't work, because W2K appears to be unsupported.
Thanks anyway. I have now almost completed my file-by-file backup and it turned out that TeraCopy was okay. You get to skip a file that is locked, then you can click on Skip All for all future such files. Then you get a list at the end to say which files failed to get copied.
Hmm, well its been a long time ago, but from memory, it was a mixed feast. Drivers certainly did not work, many apps did, but of course I cannot recall which. There were also unexplained weird crashes after this, and in the end it was thought more reliable to simply bite the bullet, wipe it off and do a clean install and yes, itst took ages then another millenium to get all the updates and all the updates to the updates, well you know how this works!
Yeah, Microtoss really tries harder than anyone to piss us off. And now they have the audacity to foist the abortion commonly known as Windows 8 on the world.
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