One quick note: this month’s MMOOS (Maine Macintosh Owners & Operators Society) meeting will be next Tuesday, October 12th (instead of the usual fourth Tuesday of the month), and will feature a close look at the powerful AppleWorks suite of productivity tools. Be in the Multi-Purpose Room at Brunswick High School at 7:00 PM (signs with directions will be posted on the main entrances).

We ended last week talking about moving files from an old computer to a new one. If you have a really old computer (no Ethernet ports, no FireWire, no USB), you may not be able to make a direct connection between the two computers. You might have to get a bit creative, working with what you do have.

As I mentioned last week, if you aren’t heavy into digital media, you’ll be surprised just how little you have to move. It might all fit on a couple of floppy disks (the 1.4MB kind, of course). If your new computer doesn’t have a floppy drive, there are very inexpensive ($25) USB-based external floppy drives available (or you might have a friend that has one). If you need to move greater volumes of data, and your old computer had a Zip drive, you could copy everything onto Zip disks, then either buy ($59 after $20 rebate) or borrow a USB-based Zip Drive that connects to the new computer.

If your old computer has a CD-RW drive, or “burner”, you can move 750MB at a time, and with a DVD burner, 4.7GB of data.

The next fastest way to move data from one computer to another is through an Ethernet networking cable. Here it gets tricky, as older systems may require a “crossover” Ethernet cable, while newer systems will work with either. If this is your only option, I suggest consulting a professional.

If you’re moving from Mac to Mac, and both have FireWire ports, you can connect them together using “Target Disk Mode”. In a nutshell, you start the old Mac, holding down the “T” key. Instead of booting up fully, the hard drive awakens like it’s an external hard drive. Using a FireWire cable, you plug the old Mac into the new Mac, and the old Mac’s hard drive shows up on the new Mac’s Desktop. It’s Drag and Drop from there.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski