Wow! I'm overwhelmed by all the all the great support. Many thanks to you, Joebeard, LookinAround and CaptainCranky. The replies have more than answered my question.
To Joebeard re:
Many such programs render thumbnails on the fly......
but I think you know that
No I didn't know that in regard to this specific application.
To LookinAround re:
Hi Poppa Bear
1. You should only need focus on saving the user's actual grahpics/pic files (for example, all their *.jpg, *.avi, *.gif, etc. etc. files)
3. Of course, if you could image the drive first you'll have everything. Here's a tip: While i know you're familiar with Acronis True Image, there's also a very handy freeware disk imaging tool EASUS Todo Backup if your friend doesn't have Acronis.....
Hope this all helps
Hi LookinAround, :wave: I'm at it again, :haha: but I learnt from the last time round, when I was doing Karen's PC, from all the excellent advice you gave me. This time I'm helping a friend who works in a mining town in the north of West Australia, and he's left his wife's PC with me which makes it a lot easier than doing it in installments at someone's home as in Karen's case.
Unfortunately her PC is a mess. The OS is corrupted and the HD has only 20MB - not GB - of space. Her "My Documents" folder has 27GB of data. There is not even enough space to defrag. So it's going to be a fresh installation of Windows XP Pro.
Your advice in my earlier post prompted me to buy an external HD. And that proved invaluable. I have already made a full Acronis Image of her OS and saved it to the external HD, using my Acronis Rescue CD which loads the Acronis program onto the RAM.
You had alerted me to EASUS freeware in the last post, and I have kept it as a backup when it would be over-kill to do a full Acronis image. So thanks for that, it's a great little program.
By the by, I do this kind of thing to help friends and don't charge, except for the cost of parts if they're needed for the PC. However, I can't claim to be "oh so altruistic!" I do it because I enjoy fixing PCs... and in the belief that what goes around comes around. And this is evidenced by the fantastic support freely given by this forum. And to me in particular. So in this case the help I'm receiving is helping a New Zealand family working in the far north of West Aussie, which gives it an international flavor. Cheers :grinthumb
To Captaincranky re:
By default Adobe Photoshop Album (as does Photoshop Elements) stores photos in (user) >"My Documents" > "My Pictures" > "Adobe", then other folders if a scanner or such is attached.
There are other files associated with the catalog file, for the thumbnails and such, and these must be brought forward to the new machine also.
Hi there Capn', :wave: nice to "come back on board again!" LOL!
I have to admit to being a bit slack. I would not have known to look for an Adobe folder in My Documents if you hadn't alerted me. Even then it took quite a bit of finding among the mulititude of 27GB worth of assorted files and folders. Ditto re the advice to bring the associated files forward to the new machine.
So thank you all once again for your great support. And my apologies for any slackness on my part in perhaps not searching more thoroughly in the first instance. I did research it on Google, but couldn't find anthing that really answered the question the way you guys have done.
Cheers PB :grinthumb