transfer

Question: My dell 8400 tower went down, replaced power supply and ..nothing. How can I get everything off the hard drive, install into another tower, or take it somewhere to download to external drive?

Answer: From what you've described, it sounds like your motherboard is probably fried. Since the Dell 8400 series run an old Pentium 4 processor, it's probably not worth bothering with trying to replace the motherboard and you're better off trying to get the data off the hard drive and replace the system altogether.

You have a couple options for doing this. You can hook up the hard drive as a slave drive in your new system, or you can use an IDE adapter that plugs into a USB port and treats your hard drive like an external USB drive.

Either way you'll need to remove the hard drive from your old system, which is easy to do. Remove the screws from the outer casing (some cases let you slide the side off without removing screws) and locate the hard drive. There will be a flat thin cable about 2 inches wide connecting it to the motherboard. Remove the screws holding the hard drive to your case (usually 2 on each side) and then remove all cables and power cords going into the hard drive.

IDE Adapter

The easiest way to get data from your old hard drive onto another desktop system or laptop is to connect it using an IDE adapter. The adapter will connect your hard drive with your other system's USB port, and will let you copy files over just like it was a USB flash drive.

Your new iPhone has arrived, and you're probably having a blast checking out the new features and showing it off to your friends.

You're also probably wondering how to copy everything from the old iPhone to the shiny new one - apps you've purchased, music, photos, contacts, email, notes - the whole enchilada.

Here are the steps I took to transfer everything from my old iPhone to my new one, by backing up my old iphone and then restoring the new iPhone from the backup. These same steps can be followed to fully backup an iPhone (and you might realize after reading this article that the backups you've been doing have not been fully backing up your purchased apps).

1. Backup the old iPhone

Connect your iPhone to your computer with the USB data cable and open iTunes. Wait for it to recognize your iPhone, and then right-click on your iPhone in the left side bar. Select "Backup" from the short-cut menu to start the backup.

The first backup took about 20 minutes on my iPhone, which was loaded with about 4 GB of data. I say first, because I ended up having to do it again because the first run didn't backup my purchased apps nor my music files.

Instead, I received an error message indicating that not everything was transferred, and that my computer wasn't authorized to play the items (even though I had already authorized my computer).

Turns out you have to tell iTunes to transfer purchased apps from your iPhone to your computer, and Apple didn't put the menu option in a prominent location.

2. Transfer Purchased Apps

When you purchase apps from your iPhone, they aren't included in the iTunes backup. You have to right-click on your iPhone in iTunes and select "Transfer Purchases".

Question: I was wondering how I would transfer music from my computer onto the memory stick and then transfer them onto my digital picture frame. Also, is it possible to have music on my picture frame when I show my pictures?

Answer: Digital picture frames are awesome. I have one at work, my wife has one at home, and we gave my parents one for Christmas this year.

Transferring pictures from your computer to a picture frame is a matter of copying the pics to a memory card or usb flash drive, and then plugging the memory card into your picture frame.

Here's a step-by-step guide for loading pictures onto a digital picture frame:

Step 1: Find the pictures on your hard drive

If you're using Windows Vista, then your pictures will most likely be located in the Pictures folder under your User folder (C:\Users\YourName\Pictures).

Expand the Pictures folder and find the photos that you'd like to view on the picture frame. If possible, copy them all to a single folder location, as that will make the next step much easier.

Step 2: Copy the pictures to an SD Micro memory card, or to a USB Flash Drive

Find the SD Micro memory card slot on the side of your laptop, or in the front of your desktop, and insert the card. Memory cards are dirt cheap these days, and you can get a 2GB card for under $10 on Amazon