I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this but I want to be certain so I'll ask.
I fried the motherboard on my old HP desktop last week. I was running Win 7. I have bought a new Dell desktop running Win 8.1 (after trying two HPs that both crashed so often I gave up on each of them one at a time!). I have installed the old HD in a SATA enclosure and plugged it into a USB-3 port on the Dell. The Dell recognizes it correctly and I can access it properly. I was pretty sure I did not damage the old hard drive, so I was pretty sure I could copy data files to a new hard drive once I bought one. I've done that, and I'm ok with the data files I've moved, etc.
I'm now ready to deal with reinstalling programs. I don't have the DVDs for many of them. Most of them I installed on the old HP from the company's websites. In some cases, there may be an "installer" file on my old hard drive, but in most cases, I will probably have to go back to the individual program creators' websites and start over.
So I have a couple questions.
1. Is there any value at all in copying any of the folders in the old hard drive's program files (x86) folder to the new hard drive?
2. Some programs I will want are things I didn't even think about until I went to the old hard drive's program files (x86) folder to review what's there. Stuff I just take for granted. Like Adobe, to read pdf files; Java, which I know one device I must use needs to work correctly; etc. How do you get software for that stuff? I'm not even sure what the website addresses are for some of this stuff! Could I just wait until I try to do something that requires those programs, and I'd get a prompt to go somewhere to download and install it?
3. Finally, [and I realize I could just try things and find this out by experiencing it], if I've downloaded and installed a program and then paid for a subscription to it, is there a way to re-download and re-install it without having to pay the creators a second time? I can't think of more than a couple possible examples of this, but I'm stingy enough to wonder about it.
Thanks for helping this newbie!
Tom
I fried the motherboard on my old HP desktop last week. I was running Win 7. I have bought a new Dell desktop running Win 8.1 (after trying two HPs that both crashed so often I gave up on each of them one at a time!). I have installed the old HD in a SATA enclosure and plugged it into a USB-3 port on the Dell. The Dell recognizes it correctly and I can access it properly. I was pretty sure I did not damage the old hard drive, so I was pretty sure I could copy data files to a new hard drive once I bought one. I've done that, and I'm ok with the data files I've moved, etc.
I'm now ready to deal with reinstalling programs. I don't have the DVDs for many of them. Most of them I installed on the old HP from the company's websites. In some cases, there may be an "installer" file on my old hard drive, but in most cases, I will probably have to go back to the individual program creators' websites and start over.
So I have a couple questions.
1. Is there any value at all in copying any of the folders in the old hard drive's program files (x86) folder to the new hard drive?
2. Some programs I will want are things I didn't even think about until I went to the old hard drive's program files (x86) folder to review what's there. Stuff I just take for granted. Like Adobe, to read pdf files; Java, which I know one device I must use needs to work correctly; etc. How do you get software for that stuff? I'm not even sure what the website addresses are for some of this stuff! Could I just wait until I try to do something that requires those programs, and I'd get a prompt to go somewhere to download and install it?
3. Finally, [and I realize I could just try things and find this out by experiencing it], if I've downloaded and installed a program and then paid for a subscription to it, is there a way to re-download and re-install it without having to pay the creators a second time? I can't think of more than a couple possible examples of this, but I'm stingy enough to wonder about it.
Thanks for helping this newbie!
Tom
