Transfer of files

[Sinned]

I'm in the process of backing up everything important off the laptop that MOH spilt juice all over. It's working pretty well considering. I've had sever problems going from the laptop to a 2T external drive. So I've taken the hard drive out and put it into a caddy and am abstracting the files from there to another laptop. The process is easier and I'm into copying photos and this is proving interesting. There doesn't seem to be any consistency over the transfer times. I have had some gallop along at the amazing speeds of 800 MB in less than 30 seconds. Yet at the opposite end of the scale I've had 18 items at 93.7 MB take nearly an hour. The display says 60.9 KB/sec but I reckon that that figure is wrong. It's not the size of the files as they are all pretty much just over 1MB and there are no HD photos. I'm at a loss to explain such large differences in transfer rates. There are about 91 files out of the hundreds that won't copy at all. The system seems to hang for about 5 minutes and there is HD activity but I just get an error message about an I/O problem. Now I know why I love Windozzzzzze ( not ). I will have to see if the photos ( of grandchildren mostly ) are important enough to give the HD to a specialist to try and recover the files. I may even send the laptop for a service if the cost isn't prohibitive ( clean out all the sugar and stuff ).