Here in South Africa, I managed to buy a separate CD/DVD player that plugs into my laptop as some of my programs like Buzz Tools are on CD. Maybe where you are you can ask your computer shop. Good luck. Hugs from Maureen
You are right. I do have one of the external ones. Problem is that some of the older programs will no longer work on the windows 10.
Oh my! I'm sure you were practicing being patient all of those hours. I'm glad you are completely backed up and ready again. I just realized a week or so ago that I have a whole lot of designs on CDs/DVDs and no way to open them now. Neither my desk top or my laptop can play them now. My poor hubby will have to help me figure a way to get all of those designs backed up.
You can purchase a external disk drive that plugs in to your computer via the USB
Better be safe than sorry, though it takes ages!
I bought my laptop in 2013 after my old one was stolen during a burglary. Fortunately I had made regular updates - but as my son would say once a year is regular as well. My frequency was not that bad, but not frequent enough to save the last fortnight of files, including digitising ;).
8 years seems to be fairly long nowadays, so I am a bit anxious it will break down any time now, but as I learned my lesson I save everything to an external hard drive and back up as well.
If you are going to purchase a new laptop and your old one still works hang on to it. Some programs will not work on the new ones. I am not sure if my 15 year old Designer Gallery will work on the new one.
You have my heart felt sympathy, know just what you are going through. I have a dear friend aged 89 years young her grandson offered to sort out her lap top, Oh did he sort it out. I offered to take it to our techie it was a right mess, our techie bless him did wonders, let me put it my way, he wave his magical fingers and hands over it and "WOW" it is now working again. LOL
All her designs were gone, grandson deleted them, she loves the way I have my computer set up, I offered to set hers up like mine plus I offered to put all her designs from her sticks and one external, that was ages ago and I am still going. It is a labor love and I cannot wait to finish it for her. She stills knits, crochets, and does the most beautiful machine embroidery. On another note she also does all her own housework and cooking, once a month she gets help to do the more heaver jobs, she is one amazing lady.
I do sympathize. I am transferring old document files, embr. files, and photos, plus really old documents, embr. files and photos from my 2 previous computers. I am 2.5 days into it and going alphabetically on the embro. files, I am up to C - Christmas. This is going to take forever. Bought the new laptop for similar reasons - first power cord gave trouble and I replaced it, then something else and I replaced it. One day I looked at it and said, you are just going to be trouble. I used to keep computers 7 years, but these last 2 did not do well - less than 3 years each, top brands and pricey. All this effort to keep from paying the Geek $100 to transfer all my files and leave them in a heap, unorganised.
So far I have never had a computer totally die on me, but they became very slow, or getting hot, Rather then letting them update to the current window version (I learned the hard way loosing programs) I moved one to my craft room and it serves as back up for my embroidery files. It also is never hooked up to the internet to prevent Microsoft from doing their thing. Ha ha Consequently I have a tower with XP, a lap top with windows 7 and the one I am working with Windows 10.