Home PC has terminally died, its about 7 yrs old. Used mainly for kids homework and stuff plus iTunes and photos. We have the music and photos on an external drive too.

Also have a couple of chrome books, iPad, iPods.

I’m guessing we need to get a new PC and install iTunes and somehow transfer music from external hard drive ?

Any reccomendationd for reasonable cheap laptop for this, plus I guess storing pics and general surfing ?

Is the old hard drive dead? Might be able to clone it and save yourself some hassle.

You could reverse sync the music from your iPod if it’s all in one place.

Grant – yes appears to be 🙁

You mention that the music and photos are on an external drive as well, in that case, you install iTunes and iPhoto on the new computer, then all you do is point them at the external drive when they ask where the library is.

As it’s all backed up to an external drive then you just need to point it there as CZ says. Well done for doing backups.

As for something new, why do you want a laptop? More expensive, more fragile, smaller screen, crap keyboards for doing proper work etc.

My usual source for stuff now is the dell outlet http://www.dell.co.uk/outlet

You could just put a new drive into the laptop (although after 7 years it’s done great service). Aside from storing photos on an external drive you get 1TB free storage on Flickr FYI. If you have chrome books and iPad surely you find them more convenient for web browsing, why get another laptop, as above cheap desktop would do the job

all you do is point them at the external drive when they ask where the library is.

CZ is correct, you can do that, but that would mean that any further content you add would be stored on the external HDD, rather than the internal HDD of your new machine – it will also leave you without a backup.

If you buy a machine with a decent capacity HDD, you can store your iTunes library on there – then use the external as a back-up as you have been doing.

All you need to do for the above is to install iTunes on your new machine (it will create a folder for itself when it does so), then drag all the content from the external into the itunes window (top-left “library” section). It will then copy the media from the external to the default folder on the internal HDD.

If you are on a PC, I can’t remember if dragging and dropping works – you might need to go file > library > add to library, or something.

It doesn’t qualify as “cheap”, but if you are primarily using your home PC for music/photos/web – consider looking at a mac. Mac-hating is popular on STW….. so I will leave it as a gentle suggestion for fear of being lambasted and labeled a brainless fanboi 🙂

edit: just read CZs post again, and i think iTunes gives you the option of “hunting” for music on your HDD when you install it from scratch, which is probably what he’s referring to (apologies). If this is the case just check that it’s copying those files from the external to the (default) itunes folder on the internal – not just referencing them. There is an option in preferences called “let iTunes keep my folder/collection organised” or something – make sure this is checked.

many thanks for all the pointers, ideal. Thinking more laptop route for portability round the house, as much of it’s use is the kids, homework, photos etc. With a couple of chromebooks and an ipad already it seems to fit better to likley uses. Have a wired printer which can be set up wireless though (current pc too old though for that)