Hi all,

I'm about to swap my old Windows XP desktop, to a Windows 10 desktop.

Most of my data is on a separate external 1tb hard drive.

Is there anything I need to do when swapping over, or can I just unplug the old one, and plug in the new one.

I know I've got software to install such as iTunes, etc...


Also, is there a free,basic version of Word that I can use for letter writing?

Cheers Frank.

Hi

Not a W10 user so can't advise on that. I'm still with W7 Professional on my work laptop - it works fine for me.

WRT Word, I believe you have to pay for it if you want to use it. However there are free office type applications which do the same thing and I believe make interchangeable files. Probably worth investigating.

IIRC, Apache are one of the freeby ones that work OK.

[Edited on 26/1/16 by nick205]

essentially, with an external hard drive, is should just work.
there are various options for a simple free 'word' program
these include open office suite
or you can use wordpad
or, if you sign up to a free microsoft account, you can use many off their office programs 'online' and free - https://www.office.com/

for office try:

https://www.libreoffice.org/

opensource and pretty good.


not sure quite what you mean by unplug and plug back in? if you mean the external hard drive, then yes that should be good to go.

However, I don't know if some apps keep config in your user profile on the machine and refer to your external hard drive. I'm afraid It has been a long time since I have migrated from one machine to another, so will probably be worth looking up the scenario for all your key bits of software. Itunes I am sure used to be a nightmare at keeping your data where you wanted it / letting you migrate etc.

However, if you have both machines side by side and on at the same time, you can at least cross compare before you do retire the old machine. (remember to hang onto the hard drive if you have anything confidential on it, or securely wipe it , not just format or re partition)

If you don't fancy paying another MS licence, try LibreOffice. It's free, is available for Windows, has the full MS Office functionality (Word, Excel, etc) and can read/write MS file formats (plus a few extra). There may be a few things that it can't do when compared to MS Office, but they're fairly obscure. It's a very professional-looking package.

It's worth a try, even if you decide later on that you don't like it.

[Edited on 26/1/16 by David Jenkins]