There may be no better time than the present to buy a new computer for your home or office. Computers are faster and more capable than ever before, and companies are aggressively slashing prices in an attempt to gain a larger market share.

Besides all that, there’s something fun about unpacking a new computer system, plugging in all of the cables and pressing the power button for that first boot-up. Suddenly, you’re a kid again with a very cool Christmas present.

Your new computer is clean — free of the little quirks and virus remnants that made the old machine crash every now and then. Unfortunately, it’s also free of your Internet bookmarks, those crucial Quicken files and your classic car screen saver.

That’s when you find yourself staring at a machine that’s useless without all your old data, wondering how you’re going to get all those old files transferred to the new machine. Upgrading to a new PC is a little like moving into a new home; before you can settle in, you have to haul all your old stuff over.

With your computer, the process is called data migration, and anyone who has ever done it knows what a time-consuming hassle it can be to move data from one machine to another.

But there are ways to reduce the pain.

One approach for Windows PCs is to investigate some of the following software programs: IntelliMover by Detto Technologies ($50 for the parallel version, $60 for the USB version); PCsync by LapLink ($60 for a downloaded version, $80 for the parallel version); PC Relocator by Alohabob ($40 for a downloaded version, $50 for a parallel version); or PC Upgrade Commander by V Communications ($40 for a downloaded version, $50 for a parallel version).

In each case, the software must be installed on both the old and new PCs. The software scans the hard drives, folders and subfolders of your old computer to inventory the data. After a few more clicks on the old PC and another click or two on the new machine — and of course, linking the two machines through a parallel port, USB or network connection — data starts appearing on the new machine.

Easy enough, right? Well, not entirely.

In most cases, these programs want to move all the contents of your old PC to the new machine. That’s great for Word documents, photos and the like, but moving programs — Quicken or Microsoft Office, for example — gets trickier. Windows XP doesn’t support older versions, so transferring a Windows 95-era program to a PC preloaded with the Windows XP operating system could be a problem; many of those programs haven’t been upgraded to run on Windows XP.

When you move the full contents of a computer system, everything moves over, including those obscure files that had your old PC running sluggish in its final days. The purchase of a new computer then allows for a little housecleaning — the equivalent of throwing away all that junk in your garage and closets. After filtering out the throwaway stuff, you might end up migrating data that could have fit on two or three floppy disks; using floppy disks isn’t always a bad idea.

If you take the time to go through your computer and get rid of old stuff — that 1998 Christmas letter, the old e-mail you will never read again or the staff memo regarding new parking space assignments — you may find yourself moving only a handful of crucial data files.

And that will make moving day go much quicker and give you much more time to enjoy your new computer, which, after all, was what you had in mind in the first place.

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POSTED ON: 6/1/2002