It will happen to you. Sooner or later, the call will come and you will find yourself teetering on the edge of a new computer because your old one has slowed to a creak. I’ve been there a few times, and latterly twice. In the old days, unless you had endless CDs, more cables than Soft Mick, and complete faith in your dial-up connection, you were going to be leaving your old home with all its familiar furniture, and starting afresh with an orange box and two sundae glasses. Remember floppies? You weren’t going to get much on those. And what about your favourite programmes? Well, you would have to reinstall them, via whatever method was available, and hope they were compatible with the new system.
Life is much easier now; we have DVDs, pen drives, portable hard drives, networks, and remote servers to use as intermediaries. Stuff often works as it should, and we’re a lot more savvy about what to do when it doesn’t. But you can still fall over and find yourself in a digital pickle as something that was supposed to work does something unexpected instead. Migrating files, folders, and apps from a 32-bit version of Windows 7 to a 64-bit version, I found out the hard way that Bonjour, a tiddly part of the iTunes package, was so incompatible that it would not even uninstall, due to having a 32-bit uninstaller. This meant I was unable to install the new version of iTunes, which meant I was tuneless and also most exceeding annoyed. I found a way round it but it took a while.
These adventures have kept me occupied, and also kept my bandwidth fully engaged, for some time, hence my lowered social media profile, (Hello Twitter, I’ll be back soon). I have waded through forums, floundered in floods of geek-speak, and despaired at the complexity of some people’s ‘easy’ solutions. I found some though, and I have made a page on my other blog on which to record them. Not only will I know where they are if I need them again, you might be able to find them too, and they might just prevent you from hurling your virtual windows, expensively, out of your real ones.
Do read the caveat – these worked for me, they might not work for you. Make a mess, and you’re on your own! Ready? It’s here
Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill 
So far, my ancient 6 year old laptop is still running, when I thought it was going to die on me a few months ago, but I took out the dead battery and I’m using it as a desktop, which is fine. I hope it lives a wee bit longer too. I do not want Windows 7, I have XP and like it…
All you can ask of technology is that it does what it’s supposed to do when you want it to do it. XP is a sturdy piece of kit that will be around a good while yet. Shame Microsoft has abandoned it though 😦
I know…sniff
Hi, I hope your computer woes have been solved. Getting a new computer is almost as stressful as moving into a new residence, with the same disorientation having to get used to the new surroundings; 🙂
Just about, thank you! I’ve had to do it again though, on a different machine, after Windows became corrupted and stopped giving me access to vital functions. Had zero support from Dell and wonderful support from PC Advisor forum members. Plus, I’d already done all this groundwork – nothing wasted!