Date   : Tue, 07 Jun 2005 00:12:19 +0100
From   : "Jason Thacker" <jjthacker@...>
Subject: Re: GoMMC versus hard drive. Which way to go?

Unfortunately Interlink doesn't ship with XP (neither does DOS, just a DOS
emulator). 

But you can set up a direct cable connection in your network settings and
transfer at ~128Kbaud across a serial connection, or obtain a parallel
laplink cable for even higher speeds. 

On a side note, when backing up my XP installation, I usually just back up
the "documents and settings" folder, and most of my apps are covered. After
all, I can reinstall software, it's the data that matters! ;)

Cheers,

       Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: Majordomo List Manager [mailto:majordomo@...] On Behalf Of
Jules Richardson
Sent: 06 June 2005 23:00
To: BeebMaster
Cc: bbc-micro@...
Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] GoMMC versus hard drive. Which way to go?

On Mon, 2005-06-06 at 22:34 +0100, BeebMaster wrote:
> I know what you mean about serial transfers!  On a slightly 
> non-related subject (although it least it gives me a chance to moan 
> about Windows etc which is always good for the mind) I found it 
> absolutely impossible to transfer my data from my old Win 95 laptop PC 
> (with no CD drive) to my new Win XP desktop machine.  Clearly nobody at
M****soft has ever thought it remotely likely that anybody would ever want
to transfer data from an old machine to a new one.

Does interlink for DOS not ship with XP? It was definitely still around in
the Win95 days but I've hardly ever used XP so I don't know what its DOS
support is like. 

That'd work over a serial line, but SMB-based networking should work if you
have a network card for the laptop. I've definitely copied data from a Win95
machine to a modern Samba server; no reason why it shouldn't work to an XP
machine though.

My main gripe about Windows is the way data's splatted all over the place
(config files etc.) and often mixed up with binary content too (and worse
still, the location of it isn't even documented for most apps). Makes it
very hard to know *what* needs to be copied between Windows systems when
upgrading. At least with Unix-based systems it's normally a case of doing
little more than backing up /etc and any home directories...

>  There is no support at
> all for anything like this and the only way I could do it was to use 
> Win HyperTerminal which can only transfer one file at once.  So I had 
> to zip the entire hard drive on the old machine and send it over as a 
> single file to the new machine via the serial link at something like 19200
baud which took 28 HOURS!!!!!!!!  Good old Bill Gates, what a genius.

For the reasons above, copying the entire drive is probably quite a sensible
plan anyway :-(

On-topic: I'd love Linux drivers for my EcoLink board so I could transfer
stuff from a beeb that way... 

seeya

Jules


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