Joy of a new computer

After two years of use every day my notebook computer was getting old. You see although working perfect and as fast as ever it is no longer state of art. Computers age faster than dogs. A look at all the usual online stores revealed no bargains so off to Madison for some brick and mortar shopping. My first stop was Wal-Mart, then Staples. Several nice laptops were in stock and on display but no deals. I did see one that fit my needs but somewhat higher in price than what I had in mind. I was there and you know the feeling I'm sure, I bought it. After telling the sales people twenty times over and over, I do not want the extended warranty or the famous Norton internet security software I made it out the door. Arriving home the fun began transferring files from the old computer to the new one. But first I uninstalled all the pork software. This took about an hour. Why do they load all that garbage on them? When moving files in the past I have done it with CDs or DVDs but this time I used a two gigabite thumb drive. First was to export the address book, then the saved emails. The emails were just forwarded with the email programs in the two computers via the internet. This worked well but a large amount of time was used up to complete this process. Now the "My Documents" folder and wow, I had saved tons of stuff in this folder. All the sub-folders that contained the photos and videos also. I have also a "Keep Me" folder that I stick downloaded programs and other files In. All of this took approximately 16 hours. Now to wipe out the data on the old laptop. I made the restore DVDs when the computer was new (no one else does this) so I popped the first one in turned the computer off then back on. The restore process started as it should and continued for about two hours. When it told me it was finished I restarted the computer. The first screen displayed and it looked like all was well. Now don't do as I do - Do as I say. Don't turn it off. The reason I turned it off was I want to sell it, therefore I wanted the new owner to enter all of their information into it. Big mistake, It crashed on the restart. So two hours of another reload job. I put the user name ln as "user" set the time, and bypassed all the things I could. Now it is for sale to a good home. The moral of this story is allow many many hours to move all the things stored on the old and into the new....... good luck !