hello, i have a new laptop, it has winxp home edition on it, and i have seen it has a file transfer utility, after buying the correct cable, i tried to run it from my old pc, which has win98, nothing happened, or it basically got to the stage where both pcs were looking for each others ports, with nothing happening, even over a half an hour period.do i need to have xp on both pcs before this file transfer will work? if not any ideas? Secondly, i was given a piece of free software called Laplink professional as an alternative to the file transfer utility on xp, which installed no problem on the old desktop i have which has win98, but when i installed it on xp on my laptop, and re-booted as normal the laptop wouldnt run, kept gettign a blue screen saying windows xp has been shut down cause error has occured and safety for you computer etc... etc... but it eventually let me on in the re-boot at a time before your computer was expierencing problems mode, so i went on and uninstalled Laplink Pro, and have had no problems, does anybody reckon i should bin Laplink pro, or is there an extra download to allow it to run on winxp home ed. basically i want to transfer files from my old desktop win 98 to my new laptop winxp, HELP....lol....thanks for replying. conor.

Hi. Laplink is a ridiculous program. It was nice back in the day, but is outdated. The file transfer wizard is pretty wild too from my experiences with it. The easiest way to accomplish what you are trying to do is set up a network between your two computers. Do they both have NIC cards, and you have a crossover cable? Run the Network Setup Wizard on your XP machine. Have it make a network configuration disk. Run the disk on your Win98 machine. The two computers should now be connected in theory, and you can transfer files back and forth between the two (as soon as you enable file sharing on the particular drives or files). -=Bryan=-

I quite agreee with Bryan, however, if your PC's are not network ready (they do not have NIC card(s)), Laplink would be a good solution which I stopped using since migrating to XP. If you go to Laplink's web site you will find that the version you are using is NOT compatible with XP. Either get the new one, or follow the suggestion above and create a simple peer-to-peer network with a crossover cable connection.