Major Computer Hardware Upgrade

Putting new computers together from scratch is relatively easy. A much bigger trick is totally moving an existing software system including the OS and every piece of software on the computer to a totally new hardware base.

Symantec offers a commercial product (Ghost) which is supposed to do that but which is problematical for several reasons. The Free Software Foundation offers a stunningly good piece of software along such lines:

http://www.clonezilla.org

This strikes me as something a2kers might want to know about. I've used Clonezilla for work projects which have mainly involved cloning linux systems, and last week put it to a kind of an ultimate test which it passed easily. The idea was that my father had a computer dating from win95 days which had been upgraded to XP and a gig of memory but which was still stultifyingly slow and, my father being close to 100 years old is not really into learning entirely new systems.

What I managed to do was obtain a bare-bones system at a local marketpro show including a reasonable case, an Asus mother board with a gig of memory, a 64-bit dual-core chip, 160-gb SATA disk and a CD drive which can at least play dvds and all of that was just about $310 including taxes

Then the question was, would an image of the old system snapped with Clonezilla and xferred to the new one even boot and if it did, would XP be bright enough to at least give the snake a mouse and keyboard and let him try to load other drivers from the CD which came with the motherboard?

The answer to everything was basically yes and the ONLY little fly in the ointment was the RealTec audio circuitry on the motherboard for which no driver either included or available at Asus, RealTec, or anywhere else on the net would work. I disabled the onboard sound and added a $10 sound card to the system and alles was in ordnung. Google searches on "realtec sucks" turn up lots of hits....

Pretty cute.