Belkin Easy Transfer Cable

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 6:02 pm

I'm looking to purchase (or rent) a Belkin East Transfer Cable. I finally bought myself a laptop to help facilitate my caching addiction. Anyone know what I'm talking about here?

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 9:19 pm

I took a look to see what it is you are looking for, thinking I have a bunch of different cables. I do not have the cable you are looking for though. you are essentially looking for a USB to USB cross-over cable.

I will look around to see if i can find one of those.

Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 10:25 pm

Here is some info I found.
First Look: Belkin Easy Transfer Cable for Windows Vista and Laplink PCmover for Windows Vista

Belkin Easy Transfer Cable for Vista Ships with Laplink’s PCsync

Walmart - Belkin Easy Transfer Cable for Windows Vista

Amazon - Belkin Easy Transfer Cable for Windows Vista

Geeks - Belkin Easy Transfer Cable for Windows Vista

Based on your question. I guess your new laptop has Vista and your older desktop has XP?

Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 7:51 am

I'm not sure there is value in using this "cable" for the transfer. For everything I use for Geocaching, it is easy enough to copy the files to a flashdrive and then reinstall in the new PC. Plus, the flashdrive can be used for many thing besides Geocaching.

Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 8:17 am

I'm under the impression that the main purpose of this cable is to transfer data and software from an older computer to a newer computer ... they seem to be an option that you can purchase with the new Windows Vista computers. So I'm not sure the main advantage of day-to-day use for a geocacher ... but then again I'm not sure of this, I could be wrong.

At any rate, I see they now sell the cables at Walmart ... I saw them by the computer systems.

Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 3:58 pm

My desktop runs MS XP while my new lap top runs Vista. The cable, as I understand it, allows you to transfer data from XP to Vista. I'd like to transfer my GSAK with reregistering it as well as a few other GPS programmes I have on my computer at the house. I'm not sure if my laptop is compatible though. They mention the need for a Pentium Processor on the laptop side, mine is AMD.

Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 8:19 am

According to Belkin this cable does work with AMD processors.
See response below from Belkin.

Quote:

Dear Sir

Many thanks for your recent enquiry; we thank you for your interest in Belkin

In regards to your enquiry yes you would be able to use the transfer cable to transfer files from your pc to your laptop. This product is also compatible with AMD processors.

Please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any further enquires

Best Regards
Tim Clutton
Belkin UK Sales

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Email Received:

I have a Desktop Pentium PC running XP and a Laptop AMD PC running Vista. Can I use the Belkin Easy Transfer cable to transfer data fromn the desktop to the Laptop? From what I can see it says that both PC`s must be Pentium`s. Is this true? If so is there a product that you offer that I can use to do this transfer?

Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 8:46 am

If you can put both the machines on a network you can transfer files that way too. Or a thumb dirve would work. You can get a 3 Gig for about $60 nowdays. just copy files from XP to the dirve and then from the drive to Vista.

Let me know if you have any more questions

Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 4:50 pm

The belkin cable is between $30-40, and pretty useless once you have used it once. Myself I would head to my local walmart and pickup a 80gb-160gb external usb hard drive for $90-$120. at least with a external drive it can be used to backup all your important files.
I fix computers and I would say less than 10% of people out there have any sort of backup of there stuff(on cd, dvd, or a hard drive). Over half the time I can recover there data from a dead windows machine, but there are times that hard drives have mechanical failures which makes getting back the data much less likely.
I can't say it enough.... spend the money and backup all your important files. it's just to bad most people ignore my advice until after there is a problem.

Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:03 pm

Thanks for the information Mr. Rod. I just put my order in for a 8mB flash drive. That drive as well as some burned CD should keep me relitively safe, but I am a cacher so I don't want to be too safe.

Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:06 pm

Quote:

I can't say it enough.... spend the money and backup all your important files. it's just to bad most people ignore my advice until after there is a problem.

Sure I never heard this advice before my hard drive crashed at X-mas time. I went and bought another hard drive and reinstalled all my important programs.

Luckily I have a laptop and have been sharing all my GSAK data and most of my Geocache info so I didn't lose any of that.

After getting back up and running I was searching around the Net and found a neat program that was actually able to get all the info I wanted off of the bad hard drive. Weird thing is that it said it was a S.M.A.R.T. failure. So I disabled S.M.A.R.T. to no avail. I later through some monkeying around found out that it has bad sectors. Undoubtedly the bad sectors must be where the MBR is or some directory info. I was really surprised when I was able to see and get all of the data from the disk (at least as far as I can tell).

The stuff I wanted mostly was all my digital pics, some non shared cache related info, all my Resumes and past tax returns.

So I learned a lesson and went out and bought some R/W DVD's (my PC already has a R/W DVD in it) and now backup my important files on the DVD. The only thing I can't figure out is why my Scheduled tasks manager won't do automatic back-ups as I have it set-up. For some reason it just won't do it automatically. So I just run it manually once a week or before I download software.

Thanks for the Late advice. Rolling Eyes