75ZT Community

She's been struggling for ages with her Toshiba laptop, around 6 years old. The problem has been that when she boots it up, the screen has flickered like mad, only fixable by constantly moving it up and down swiftly until it "settles". However, at this stage the mouse and keyboard have not always worked, so necessitating waggling the screen around again. Usually she's been able to find a working position for the screen within around 5 mins max

However, today it's proven impossible, unless there's forward pressure on the top left corner (as in pulling it towards the keyboard). So, no pressure, screen looks OK but no way to input, pull it forward, then everything works.

She's finally said "enough is enough" and been to the newly opened Argos (half a mile away, handy!) and bought a new Toshiba! She's now happily sitting setting the new one up, but I can foresee two problems:-

1) Getting the old one going for long enough to transfer all the stuff across. Possibly achievable by sitting it on the table with something applying pressure to the back?

2) Getting all the MS Office apps up and running again. I'm pretty sure I have a disc somewhere with copies of Office 2007 (might take some finding!) but not sure if it's got the codes on it! (NB: It's not hooky, but I seem to think it's not in it's original case and therefore codeless!)

I'd suggest removing the old HDD and connecting it to the new lappy via a USB port Dave. Universal HDD to USB adaptors are cheap on fleabay but if you only need it once I can let you borrow mine

The USB solution, as Paul suggested, will be the easiest way to copy your personal files onto the new computer. And to get hold of all of your license keys, you could use the LicenseCrawler.

I can't really add anything to the above. But I will add something, get into the habit of having a backup for those files. Then if the laptop dies, or similar, you have a way of recovering. So many people keep their precious photos and similar in one, vulnerable, place.

Personally having been bitten at a very early age (when likes were stored on 5 1/2" floppies, I store my photos on a mirrored disk server (OK even if one disc dies) and backed up weekly to another disc kept in a different room. I'm still working out how to protect against losing both of those.

Thanks for the advice and also the offer of the disc caddy Paul!

Hopefully we'll be able to coax the old machine back into life for long enough to copy what's needed, but if we can't, the above sounds like a plan! She's currently getting used to Windows 8.1 before we throw ourselves into the copying and reinstating scenario....

Also good advice re LicenseCrawler Jürgen - all I need to do is find the discs and then we are away!

Hopefully our backups are reasonably robust. We tend to copy most important stuff so it's on each other's laptops, the WD server in the hallway, and also have a fair bit on Dropbox etc, although you can never be 100% safe I guess!