Travel Technology - Ghosting drive in old laptop to use in new laptop

My Tosh is 2yrs old and about ready to be replaced for a variety of reasons.
One of ehe nasty parts of migration to a new box is reinstalling all the applications.
So I was thinking about ghosting my old drive onto the new one...but:
* I presume that all windows XP instability I currently have (it's not bad but it is definitely there) will "travel" with the ghost image
* If I migrate to a non-toshiba (thinking strongly about Lenovo X300) will I have device driver issues?
So should I just block off a day and re-install everything?

Yes, reinstall your machine. Ghosting is only really useful if you are going from like-to-like hardware.

I have a X300; love it. Standard battery life is miserable though. Sooo lite, great for travel.

Yes, reinstall your machine. Ghosting is only really useful if you are going from like-to-like hardware.

I have a X300; love it. Standard battery life is miserable though. Sooo lite, great for travel.

+1

You will certainly have driver issues. Not that they can't be overcome with time, patience, and luck, it's usually not worth the hassle and is typically easier to just reinstall your apps.

I've had 1 occasion where an old desktop computer was running a mission critical application in a business and the software was simply not available to reinstall. We found this program from Acronis ($80) (http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATICW/) which has a "Universal Restore" add-in ($30) that allows you to perform a restore to different hardware. It took a bit of tweaking, but the application now runs fine on a new Dell.

+1

You will certainly have driver issues. Not that they can't be overcome with time, patience, and luck, it's usually not worth the hassle and is typically easier to just reinstall your apps.

I've had 1 occasion where an old desktop computer was running a mission critical application in a business and the software was simply not available to reinstall. We found this program from Acronis ($80) (http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATICW/) which has a "Universal Restore" add-in ($30) that allows you to perform a restore to different hardware. It took a bit of tweaking, but the application now runs fine on a new Dell.

+2
Definitely reinstall. It is good maintenance to reinstall from time to time. You got a new computer for a reason. Don't bring over old issues to a new computer. It wont take as long as you think to reinstall.

I think it will be a nightmare to ghost over an image on a laptop from something that is not the exact same machine, so add another tick in the don't do it column.

Reinstall is the way to go. I don't even ghost most of the time at the office on the same hardware, just start off clean and eliminate any changes to stuff that cause thet issues over time.

Have you considered virtualizing your old machine and then running the VM image on your new machine? That's what I did when moving from a win machine to a Mac as well as to another windows machine.

VMWARE has a free software on their website to virtualize and then you can purchase (relatively cheaply) the player for your new machine.

One thing I learned the hard way the first time I did this is remove ALL of your data from the old machine before you virtualize it, otherwise you will end up with a VM image that is too huge to run.

I use VMWARE for a ton of stuff. The biggest use is to use Linux on my Windows desktop. I really love being able to easily switch back and forth. I don't know that I'd use vmware as my primary system though. I think you can feel the performance impact of vmware at times -- of course YMMV.

I have always set up my hard drives with three partitions.
c: has Windows plus all Microsoft applications
d: has all non-Microsoft applications
e: has all documents, photos, music, etc.
I only need to back up e: and I can simply copy all folders in that partition to the new computer when I get a new computer.
I reinstall all applications to c: or d: as appropriate.

I have always set up my hard drives with three partitions.
c: has Windows plus all Microsoft applications
d: has all non-Microsoft applications
e: has all documents, photos, music, etc.
I only need to back up e: and I can simply copy all folders in that partition to the new computer when I get a new computer.
I reinstall all applications to c: or d: as appropriate.

Why the distinction between C: & D:? Any non-MS apps that are installed on D: will make changes to registry hives on C:. I see no purpose in this.

Keeping data on a separate partition makes some sense, assuming you can't figure out how to tell your backup software which folders to copy. Keeping your OS & apps on a separate physical drive from your data - now that actually makes sense.