Happiness is: a New PC and/ IntelliMover
By Mike Hodges, Treasurer, Tampa PC Users Group
mphs@aol.com
This article is a sequel to the article published in the April newsletter entitled, “Buying a new PC”. My intent of publishing this article is to inform those who were curious what I thought of my new purchase. Well, the PC I had selected, namely the Gateway 600X notebook, arrived within seven days after the order being placed, as I had anticipated in the article, a week before promised, at 6.59 PM on Friday 4 April. UPS does not deliver to residences after 7pm, so it was a close call, and I was delighted that I had the whole weekend to set up and exercise my latest purchase. Referring to the April article, you will see I paid a moderate price for this highly recommended machine. See my previous article at http://www.tpcug.org/newsletter/nl_2003/april2003/new_pc.htm for the machine configuration and the comparison chart with other PCs.
First, let me say I remain delighted with my choice, and I am convinced that this is because I had conducted a thorough selection process. I had the machine unpackaged and up and fully running in under 30 minutes, and this was achieved in spite of the fact that I had never actually owned a machine with an XP operating system before.
Prior to the machine arriving I was able to track the order on the Gateway web site on a daily basis, all the way from order arriving at the plant in Taiwan, shipment from Taiwan within the following 48 hours and delivery via Alaska to my door. I was aware the machine was already in Tampa by 7 AM on the day of delivery. The longest delay, and therefore the longest day, appeared to be on the final day with the machine riding around Tampa in the UPS local delivery truck. More so as I had to leave my house at 5 PM, two hours before the UPS delivery arrived at my door. Fortunately I was able to have someone standing by to receive the UPS delivery at my house, so convinced was I that the package would arrive that very day.
So on the following Saturday morning, I set to work and was delighted that within 30 minutes I had the new machine unpackaged and fully up and running and set about to verify that all the features were working as advertised. I loaded my first DVD and was delighted at the superb graphic display. I was able to verify my Verizon DSL connection and 56K modem and floppy drive operation all within the next 30 minutes. The only feature that I could not test was that the PC was in fact wireless enabled as I did not own a transmitter to verify this ordered feature. In all respects the machine appeared to be sizzling fast as compared to my old IBM 1998 vintage ThinkPad 1400i. Recently I set up my old 1998 vintage 300 MHz IBM laptop and was dismayed how slow access and set up was as compared to my new 2.2 GHz Gateway 600X. I had now grown accustomed to the speed of all that I do with my new PC so that the old IBM machine is pretty much ancient history in my house. You may recall that the final straw with maintaining my old machine was that the USB port was not enabled and as a consequence I was not able to hook up another recent purchase, namely an HP V40, All In One copier, fax scanner printer. This HP V40 I was also able to get running with my new PC within just ten minutes. All that remained thereafter was for me to transfer the two gigs of mostly graphic data from my old PC to my new notebook. At Gateway, at time of the initial PC purchase, I had also purchased IntelliMover, a program designed to help speed up this otherwise laborious file by file transfer. Again the process was trouble free. First I loaded the IntelliMover CD onto the IBM laptop and followed the wizard instructions and then selected all the files I wished to transfer. Most likely I selected 98% of the two gigs of data. It is always difficult to leave anything, once created, behind and not generally thereafter readily accessible. I then loaded the IntelliMover CD on my new PC and then, when prompted, I hooked up the provided parallel to parallel cable to connect the two PCs. The IntelliMover package had provided two sets of cables, a USB interconnect cable and a parallel port interconnect cable. Because my old IBM PC did not have an enabled USB port I was relegated to the parallel connections. The file download required eight, yes eight, hours to transfer all the designated files through the parallel port. The USB connection would have been six times faster and therefore could have completed the transfer in 80 minutes. However, I must say the process was relatively simple and easy to follow, and indeed all the files I selected have apparently transferred from the old machine to the new machine without loss. I highly recommend that as you build up programs on your PC you maintain a large envelope in which to store all the program and backup CDs supplied. In the event one has problems or moves to a new PC or it is necessary to restore the PC disc drive; thereafter, all the materials will be readily found in one package. These days we appear to be awash in CDs, and an envelope holding all those programs that will be needed for recovery is a great safeguard from panic and frantic searches at a possible future date.
So now I have achieved my objective; I have retained all the intense data files, mostly graphics previously generated on my old PC, have plenty of hard drive space, 60 gigs for future use and I am working in the Microsoft XP Professional environment. With my old PC setup I forever had to delete files to make room for additional applications or downloads. I have even been able, at last, to set up the video cam that Verizon provided me when I initially signed up for DSL some thirty months ago. So now I can be even more productive than previously, in all my computing labors.
Happy computing to all.
Selected quotes on “Happiness”