I just bought my very first laptop (WOHOO!) and I want to be prepared when it arrives. What I'd like is to keep my email and bookmarks synchronized between my laptop and desktop. I don't want to just point them to the same network folder, as I will travel with my laptop and the network may not be accessible. I'm thinking a good folder synchronization program would do the trick. Something that would be installed on both PCs, to monitor each others folders. When files in one of the folders change, it should update those same files on the other PC. This way everything is handled behind the scenes, with no interaction required on my part. Is there good software out there that does this? Any personal recommendations? How do you guys handle keeping things synchronized between PCs? - Houdini

Well, there is something in Windows called off-line files. It's available since Windows 2000 and it will allow you to synchronize local files with a network share, so you could share some directories on your desktop and use off-line files on your laptop to keep it all in sync.

Unfortunately I don't have the faintest idea of how to set this up, but from what I hear at work it seems to be an excellent solution for your file problem and maybe it'll also work for your bookmarks. Synchronizing mail however is a bit more difficult, unless you have an IMAP server. That essentially gives you synchronization 'for free'.

Well, hope this helps. Good luck with it :)

I know that XP Pro can do exactly what you want to do, but XP home cannot.

Thanks for the replies, guys. I'll take a look at XP's off-line feature and see if it'll do what I want.

Any other comments/recommendations are welcome!


- Houdini

Ok, I think I have a decent solution. Thought I'd post it for anyone else who's looking to keep a laptop and desktop synchronized.

Windows XP offline files is a decent solution, but it has a few problems, such as you can't use fast user switching, and it doesn't automatically include newly created subfolders in synchronization. The other issue is that I can't have my email client open on both computers and have them auto-sync correctly (you can only have one running at a time).

So, here's my solution: I'm going to use Google Mail for email, so no synchronization required for that. For everything else, I'm going to use a free synchronization program called AllwaySync.


- Houdini