off topic computer question

Can't he do other things while it's happening? Like read alt.home.repair?

YOu can't do it that simply. At best-buy, staples or office-depot, probalby best buy, maybe all 3, they had a device that is designed for this. It was only about 20 dollars iirc, maybe 24. It might have had teh orange geek guy on the label, but maybe not. If you look in the USB cable area, I think that's where it is. It might have had some little box in the middle.

When things like this were done with serial cables from one serial port to the other (very slow, slower than printer ports) a regular serial cable wouldn't work. A null modem was needed, one in which two of the wires reversed on their way from one end to the other. (They cost no more to make than a regular serial cable, but might have been a little more expensive because there were 100 times as many of the other ones made. This may not be the same issue USB cables face -- I don't know -- but at least we hanven't gone backwards.

No, not nearly, and in addition, there is no way it would get from the USB port back to the power supply and from there to the harddrive to power the harddrive. Even an exteranl harddrive, or a harddrive case (used to turn a plain old harddrive into an external harddrive. Under

Not in my neighborhood.

Make the data hard drive a slave and just copy the data unto the master drive. Or, burn on a DVD.

Then remove the slave drive.

I don't think so. Even if he could, USB connection speed is terribly slow for that sort of thing.

The better way is to network the two computers. Each PROBABLY has a network port built in, so it's merely a matter of a cat-5 cable connecting them and following the steps outlined in the networking wizard.

Of course the instructions are in geekeze, so he'll need the help of a

An alternative, assuming both can access the internet and he has a high-speed connection, is to use the 8-or-so Gigabyte storage offering of Google Mail and send the files as attachements from one machine while retrieving them with the other machine.

On Tue 28 Jul 2009 06:06:39p, mm told us...

We have two desktop PCs and a laptop at home, all connected to a home network via a router. Configured correctly, any of the three machines has total access to either of the other two. Transferring files between them is very fast.

Yes, I hadn't though of that or the router (EVen though just tonight for the first time it occurred to me if I want to have a second computer, I should network them.

LOL, but true.

Isn't that still slow because the email protocol is slow, including for attachments. I was always told not to email programs for example, because they are long, but to ftp them to webspace, and then have the other guy ftp them back down. File Transfer Protocol. There are free ftp programs if this comes up a lot. (Sometimes urls use FTP without you're asking them too, especially those heirarchical libraries I used to see. Browsers seem to have what they need to handle ftp for the last 15 years or so. But you still need a separate program to access private webspace with no webpage or software surrounding it. Like what your ISP offers you. It's like you can put up bookshelves and a card catalog, to help people get what they want, or you can just put a book there with an address named after your book, your file. I don't do any of this. )

In addition, you remind me, it surprised me to find out there are real issues in emailing attachments. A friend has a Mac and I would sent to him two files every week or so, one .rtf and one .htm . Each file had a standard font and a fairly rare one. It turned out, he coould read the .rtf pretty well, but not the .htm files. And it turned out his file length was a few hundred bytes shorter than what I sent him. I think maybe the missing bytes had held the second font information. I think maybe some special character in the file was treated as an end of file marker, but I never found out. The problem seemed to get bad when I switched from win98SE to XP, even though my email program was the same, exactly the same, still running from the C: partition (Because Eudora doesn't really get installed in windows. It just has to sit there>)

During testing, I decided to try Outlook Express to send the files. When I sent the same files to him, and the opposite was true. The .rtf file was bad and the .htm file was good. Even when I sent the files to ME and read them with Eudora, that was true.

I thought attachments were always exactly what one sent when they got to the receving end, but it seems to be much more complicated.

Is he using USB-1 or USB-2.

I have an XP system and I replaced the USB-1 card with a USB-2 card and the speed of the USB drive is very much faster. I would guess it is close to the speed of my hard drive.

Freckles

From what you've said, the dude has a bigger problem. He is not making backups. If he were, you could backup one machine and restore to another. The solution with to get an external hard drive and copy everything to it. The pick and choose what you want to move between computers after everything is on the external drive.

However, putting in a small (cheap) network is a better idea in the long run but doesn't address the backup issue.

If both computers have network cards, use what's called a crossover cable. this will eliminate the need for the router someone mentioned Be sure both computers are set to the same workgroup and both have file sharing enabled

Do files to be shared have to be in a certain folder, or maybe the folder has to be listed somewhere? I've never done this, but I think I read that somewhere?

As to USB2, wouldn't having a faster USB port also speed up the flashdrive? Even if it doesn't, I don't assume he's moving the whole system and I don't see a problem using the flash drive. When I had dial up, while webpages downloaded, I read my email and my newsgroups.

He can get an 8 gig flashdrive, or a 4 or 2 but the big one isn't that much more money. They may have 16 by now, or greater. Soon 8 will be the smallest and they'll be giving 4 away as premiums. Ilike my sanza flashdrive with U2, I think it is, because data and qualified programs can both reside on it, and all I have to do is plug it into any XP or higher USB port and I can run my programs with my flashdrive without bothering their hard drive. Plus there is plenty room for other storage.

Just right click on the folder you want, select sharing and share it I just have one called backup on my server machine and drag every thing into it I want to backup from other machines. That is on a RAIDed pair of drives (mirrored)

Email is a silly idea for lots of reasons:

1. DSL and Cable Internet services will download data pretty fast but they are VERY slow to upload. It will kill you on GByte data volumes.
2. As you say the protocols associated with email and attachments carry a significant overhead.
3. Few mail systems accept very large attachments. Gmail is more generous that most but the limit is somewhere around 10-15MB.

Much better to network the computers:

1. Point-to-point with a cross-over cable. This is the cheapest option.
2. In a star network with a relatively inexpensive hub.
3. A full network so that both computers can share your internet connection as well as each others storage, and maybe a printer or two.

Option #3 is pretty inexpensive these days and offers so much utility that it's simply not worth messing around with options #2 or #3.

You can buy a good quality router/firewall and a bunch of good quality cable for less than $100 and both computers can share anything. Just do it.

Most folks used to us Lap-Link for the purpose but it's so easy now with what's already there. Small network switch or cross over cable will do the trick. Google "how to share files on win computers", there is so much available on The Internet now that I can't get most folks to pay me to set it up for them, DARN!

TDD

Spring for a bigger flash drive... or something.

Your task should take only a few minutes.

A DVD burns in just a few minutes. -----

- gpsman

On Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:33:41 -0400, against all advice, something compelled "Stormin Mormon" , to say:

He wants a crossover cable plugged into the network ports, and the hard drives set up for sharing.

No.

Not only no, but hell no.

Temporarily install the "source" drive into the computer he is moving the files TO.

You would guess wrong...

Wow! Sight unseen and you know more about my system than I do? Amazing!

He doesn't have to know more about your system if he knows more about transfer rates.

USB-2 theoretical maximum bandwidth is 480Mbit/s. In the real world, counting system overhead, packet information, and the like, the actual transfer rate is about 25-60MByte/s for USB-2.

Your ordinary SATA hard drive (bandwidth of 3Gbit/s) will move data at around 300MByte/s - about 50 times faster.

Here's a comparison chart (scroll down):

Did he buy the flash drive at harbor freight? I know lots of folks think if it looks the same it must be the same but there is a huge difference in speeds of flash drives. It becomes very, very evident when you are dealing with lots of data.

Suppose he takes a USB cable, from one computer to the