Easy schmeasy

As I grow older I become more and more suspicious of things that proclaim themselves to be "easy" One may say that this is just because I am older and therefore more mentally enfeebled than I may have been. However, the evidence has shown that things which try to be easy to use can become a downright pain in the butt when the algorithms used to make decisions are just plain stupid.

I have recently upgraded my PC in the manner to which so many of us are accustomed to a more recent, four core processor with a good amount of memory. Of course I used Windows 7 as the operating system and very good i is too, with nice graphics and sixty four bit goodness running all the little cores as it should. My old machine, which I have had for a few years now, has a couple of hard discs and a ton of data that I don't want to loose. So, what did I do? I thought "I'll use Windows Easy Transfer to get my data onto my new machine!"

This is where the whole "easy" premise fell flat. I bought a Belkin Easy Transfer cable for the princely sum of thirty eight euros and inserted the disk for the install. The installer told me that because my machine was running vista there was no need to install software and that the dongle on the Belkin cable held the plug 'n' play application. Ok, I plugged in the cable and the software immediately assumed that my old computer was my new computer and that I wanted to transfer too it. Wrong!

I started easy transfer on the new machine and it told me that i had to install the latest and greatest software on the old one. A process I had earlier been told was uneccesary - ho hum.

So, after copying the software, installing it on the old machine and starting the proccess I had to wait for about half an hour while the system decided what I should transfer. Ok, I want my account but not my wifes, the old admin or the guest account. Moreover, I want some documents but not settings for my ATI graphics card because the new machine has an NVidia card. All this means selecting from the several hundred tickable boxes and an hour or so of triage I get what I want reduced to a couple of hundreg gigabytes and... The blasted easy transfer client on my old machine crashes with a data execution exception. AAARRRGGGGHHH!!!!

So much for "easy"