Expert: Bobbert - 7/5/2010

Question
Hello...
Thanks for taking questions.
Looking to purchase a new Dell Inspiron 580.  Is there any difference of great consequence between an Intel Pentium G6950 or the Intel Core i3-540?  
Also, is there a way to transfer an ancient (7 years old) Money Works program and significant data from Windows XP to Windows 7 without it being a nightmare?  
Basic terminology appreciated for technically-challenged oldie but goodie!

Answer
Depending upon what you intend to do with the machine - no there really won't be much difference between the two. The Core i3 will have a performance advantage with very CPU intensive tasks like data compression or video encoding however aside from that you shouldn't notice much of a difference in day to day use (things like running a web browser, running a mail client, or playing average games). If the price difference is enough to matter to you, go with the Pentium, otherwise take the Core i3 as it does offer better performance.

As far as your application - it may install natively on your new Windows 7 machine, if you get Windows 7 Professional or above you will have "Windows XP Mode", a virtualization tool that allows running legacy applications within Windows 7. This may also be an avenue for your application run. As far as getting data from one system to another, I'm not really sure as I'm unfamiliar with this specific application - if the software supports saving/exporting data you should be able to transfer the data to another machine relatively easily (for example save your working data set as a file, and then just copy that file to the new computer with the same application installed and open the file - shouldn't be a problem).

-bob