Upgrading from an old computer to a new one is a bit like moving house – lots of “stuff” has to be transferred. Alas, it is no easier to move computer than it is to move house. You need to carefully pack everything for transportation at one end, and then unpack everything into the right place at the other. At least with computers, everything gets duplicated so you always have the old one to go back to if you forgot something.
The first decision is how all your data is actually going to move – you need to choose some form of transportation. Most likely, you will use a container of some sort ; a USB memory stick if you don't have a lot of stuff or are patient, CDROMs if you want to be able to permanently keep backup copies of everything, or DVDs if you want to do the same thing on fewer (read, higher capacity) disks. Both of the last two require CD or DVD writers on the old machine, of course.
You may also want to make moving computer a much easier activity in future and permanently switch to some form of separate storage such as an external hard-disk drive or a second internal hard-disk drive. In this case, your computer would run its operating system and applications (such as word-processing, email, web browser) from its own internal disk, but store all your data on a separate disk which simply unplugs from one computer and plugs into a new computer. Note that this is not as simple as it sounds, as some applications expect data to live in predefined places (such as Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, which bury all your email data in a very obscure place for some reason).
You can also go for the “conveyor belt” option – establish a direct connection between the old and new computer eg. through a network or special cables/software that enables you to directly copy data from the old to the new. An extension (or derivative) of this method includes using your internet connection eg. you could package up the data and email it to yourself or temporarily store it on a webserver somewhere. You probably wouldn't use this latter option unless you only had a small amount of data to transfer. It's also possible to send data from one computer through the internet directly to another, but that takes a fair bit of technical expertise.
Having chosen your method of transportation, the next question is what to pack and what to leave? The easy answer is “take everything that is unique to you” - all your documents, spreadsheets, emails, address books, software licence numbers and installation packages (if you downloaded them), all your photos and home movies. Where all these live will be according to how organised or otherwise you are, and whether you always accept the defaults for applications or like to customise them so that things are kept in sensible (to you) places.
Bear in mind you will probably need to re-install several applications (eg. Microsoft Office, or your camera software, etc.). These may require re-entering licence numbers, or you may need to adjust their settings according to your preferences. Then its a case of copying in all the data that you want from your old computer, using whatever transportation medium you chose. Put them in the same locations in the new computer, or you may want to take this opportunity to reorganise and keep everything together to make this process easier in future eg. create a directory named “data” or “mystuff” and then build sub-directories that you understand in that directory.
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