My old laptop was at its end-of-life, it’s had over heating problems and lately the hard-drive has been failing. It’s been good to me though, pretty much daily use for 3 years straight (and a few beatings). So I got a new laptop, with Windows 7 installed — the old one had Windows XP. I looked everywhere to find out how to sync your iPhone to a new computer without losing data but I came up pretty short.
Here are the steps I took (the easiest steps) to transfer all my data and keep my iPhone synced to my new laptop without losing data and having to re-organize everything.
Transfer your iTunes library to your new computer
Apple actually has a pretty good knowledge base article on transfering your iTunes library to a new computer. I performed the “Home Sharing” option, it worked out well. If you do it, run it at night when no one else will be using the internet… this import will pretty much saturate your network connection. I had about 28GB of data to transfer, it was completed by the time I got up the next morning.
Sync your iPhone to the new computer
When I hooked up my iPhone to the new computer, it warned me that it would erase everything. I did not like this at all… my iPhone setup is just the way I want it and I did not want to have to deal with losing all my data. So I looked all over the internet to find out the best way setup a new computer to handle syncing an iPhone.
I found this incomplete documentation for doing what I needed, except it didn’t go into nearly enough detail. I suspect it was because I was moving from Windows XP to Windows 7, but even if your username changed I think you would still have trouble. His documentation focuses on the “Library Persistent ID” but when I changed just that ID, iTunes didn’t recognize anything from my library. I think this is because the “Library Persistent ID” is tied to the other file’s ‘Persistent ID”, so you’d need to change all their IDs too. But I found an easy way to deal with this. This is what I did:
These are the steps from the video above:
Locate your iTunes music folder (can be found in Edit -> Preferences in iTunes)
Close iTunes
Backup the iTunes Music Library file and the iTunes Library file
Get a copy of your old computer’s iTunes Music Library file
Open the new iTunes Music Library file and the old iTunes Music Library file
Perform a Find/Replace on the old iTunes Music Library file — I used Notepad++to do this.
In the old file search for the Music Folder <string> (e.g. file://localhost/C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/layotte/My%20Documents/My%20Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/)
Replace with the value from the new file (e.g. file://localhost/C:/Users/layotte/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Media/)
Save the newly created file contents into the new computer’s iTunes Music Library file.
Open the new computer’s iTunes Library file, put some random characters in it and save (this causes it to be corrupted).
Open iTunes.
iTunes now recognizes the corrupt file and rebuilds your Library with the new persistent ID from the iTunes Music Lirbary file. After that, you will be able to check the button without being prompted to Erase and Sync your data.
A couple weeks ago I heard about this app called Sleep Cycle. Sleep Cycle is a bio-alarm clock that analyzes your sleep patterns and tries to wake you when you are in the lightest point in your sleep cycle. The app only costs .99$. It was actually the first app I have ever purchased. I purchased Sleep Cycle for two reasons. First, I definitely believe in the power of waking up at the right time. Two, I thought this was a pretty innovative app and was worth a try for a buck.
If you know anything about sleep, than you know we sleep in cycles. We move in and out of a dream states and a deep sleeps. An average cycles is about 90 minutes long. The theory goes that if you wake up during your deep sleep, you do not feel as rested. If you wake up when you are in the lightest point of your sleep cycle, you will be able to wake up and get out of bed much easier. I find this to be somewhat true, depending on how much sleep I actually get. Usually I sleep about 6-7 hours each night… I usually go to bed late and get up early.
One thing that I really like about this app is that it keeps a historical record of your sleep cycles for each night. The first thing I do in the morning is look at my previous night’s sleep. Check out my graphs for this past work week:
If you look at Thursday, you will see some weird spikes around 2:30AM and 5:00AM. Those were when Gus woke me up to drink some water and then woke me up to go outside (because he drank too much water, I assume).
As much as I love this app, I think there are two major flaws.
The app is a basic alarm clock, which is great. The way it works is, if you need to be up by 6:30, then you set the Sleep Cycle alarm to wake you up by 6:30. It monitors your sleep cycle and when it feels you are at the most “awake” point in your cycle, it will wake you up. However, if you are in a deep sleep it will wait until 6:30 to wake you up. This is fine, the problem is that you only have a 30 minute window. So it will wake you up anywhere between 6:00 and 6:30. The problem is that the average sleep cycle is 90 minutes. There have been times when my cycle dropped to deep sleep right before the 6:00 mark and it woke me up at 6:30 while I was still deep asleep.I think it would make more sense to make the “alarm” window 45 minutes or 90 minutes… or customizable.
I only use this app Monday through Friday because I generally do not need to be up at a certain time on the weekends. However, I would still really like to know what my sleep cycle was like on the weekends. It would be great if I could just set it to track my sleep, then whenever I woke up and I could see what happened through the night. Currently the only way to accomplish this is to set an alarm for later than you would normally wake up. Here is an example of what the graph looks like when I woke up on my own:
I guess those two are not really major flaws… they are more like, major feature requests. Some other feature ideas would be:
Ability to customize the alarm sound from the iPhone’s music collection.
Enable the recording device to record whenever it detected noise. So when I am in my dream sleep, I can click to see what I may have said through the night.
It currently allows you to share your stats by email and Facebook, should add an option for Twitter.
Well, that is about it, overall I really like this app and have already incorporated it into my daily routine. I do not think it will help me get more sleep, but hopefully it will continue to help me wake up easier.
I downloaded Boxed In a few weeks ago when it went “free”. I got a little stuck on level 44 and went online to find a hint. There were not very many out there, so I figured I’d make a walk-through for each level of the game. So I posted all the screen shots here, separated by level. Just click on the level you want help with and you’ll see the screen shots in the order of which box I moved.
When I hooked up my iPhone to the new computer, it warned me that it would erase everything. I did not like this at all… my iPhone setup is just the way I want it and I did not want to have to deal with losing all my data. So I looked all over the internet to find out the best way setup a new computer to handle syncing an iPhone.
