Purchasing a Toshiba - Satellite Laptop Model: A505-S6033 | SKU: 9705203

Purchasing a Toshiba - Satellite Laptop Model: A505-S6033 | SKU: 9705203 and not looking fordward to loading all my many programs, favorites and doctuments.
Do you guys recommend purchaseing a external hard drive that cost about $125 dollars downloading everything except the windows 7 from the old computer and then dump these things into my new computer or will this even work. This sounds easer to me.
Thanks

 

You can’t typically just copy over applications from one computer – you need to install them from their setup and installation, so that registry entries and other things are set up correctly.

Getting a new computer is also a good opportunity to make sure that you have a current version of each application. Sometimes (not always) this won’t cost you anything. Older versions may have compatibility problems with Windows 7, or worse, security vulnerabilities. A good application that helps manage applications from a security and end-of-life perspective is Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) ( http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/). If you still choose to install older apps, than at least with PSI you are better informed and can possibly install patches that you may not have had on your older system.

You didn’t say what types of applications you had, but if most are general productivity things common on most systems (PDF reader, flash player, etc.), then they can all be downloaded easily and the most current release is the way to go. If you have relatively fast broadband, then it doesn’t take long at all to pull this stuff down.

Regarding favorites and documents, any USB drive – either a flash “thumb” drive or a hard drive – should work great. Sometimes even hundreds or thousands of documents can end up not requiring that much space to where a less expensive flash drive will be adequate.

 

What gpgp00 said.

Windows applications almost always use the registry. It's often difficult, when not impossible, to carry over all of the fiddly registry settings.

I like the Toshiba overall, but instead of a hard drive get a 12-cell battery:

Toshiba Primary High Capacity 12-Cell Li-Ion Battery Pack - Toshiba