I recently received a new Dell E6500 laptop. As any ITPro knows, transitioning the primary machine is never easy... Lots of settings, program issues, backup data, etc...
In my case, this was finally my official jump into 64-bit from Vista 32-bit to Vista 64-bit. There have been a few issues, such as a Canon LiDE 20 scanner which I really like for portability that I will need to say goodbye to as well as my Microsoft webcam not working yet because of 64-bit compatibility... ;-)
I also noticed when I configured dual-boot that some of the hardware does not get detected properly natively... I am still working on that... See this article for further info:
http://owsug.ca/blogs/brad/archive/2009/01/07/Old-School-Dual-Boot-Configured-on-my-Dell-Latitude-E6500.aspx
For the laptop transition, I had been faithfully backing my Dell D820 laptop up with Windows Complete PC Backup. This is the utility that is installed by default with Windows Vista and it runs famously.
By using a utility called vhdmount which comes with Virtual Server 2005 R2, I was able to mount the backup image from my D820 offline and use it as if it were a local disk to transfer files. I have this image archived on an external USB drive which is fantastic as a safety net...
Read more on my Tech Republic article here:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/networking/?p=785
For great, in-depth, technical training on System Center, check out www.infrontconsulting.com/events.htm.