No, Microsoft Outlook 2010 is not going to have size restrictions on what you send. But there are two reasons why this plan will not work.
First, your ISP almost certainly has a limitation on the size of an email that you can send. Movies and full-length videos are huge and ISPs don’t like it when you email files that big. So, they’re probably not going to let you do it.
Second, you’re not going to want to do it that way anyway because what you’re talking about is using email, and that means uploading it (all) to your email provide, and then downloading it (all) to your other machine. Even on a fast internet connection that’ll take a lot of time.
There are better ways.
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What’s wrong with email?
If you think about it, email isn’t just something on your machine. It’s a service provided by your ISP or some other entity. When you email a file anywhere, that file is actually uploaded to an email server over your internet connection. If you then want to receive it on another machine, it’ll be copied back down your internet connection.
Email doesn’t work machine-to-machine, but rather, machine to server to machine, where that server is on the other side of your internet connection. So by suggesting that you use email, you’re actually proposing that you upload the file and then download it, just to transfer it to another machine.
Unless you’ve got a blazingly fast internet connection, it’s going to take forever!
What’s a better solution?
The right way to do this? I have two recommendations.
- What’s wrong with ejecting the external drive from one machine and putting it in another? This is a perfect scenario for doing exactly that. In other words, copy your huge file to your external drive or a thumb drive that’s big enough, then take that over to the other machine, attach it, and copy the file onto that machine.
- The other approach is to Use Windows Networking. Normally I don’t talk a lot about Windows Networking because it can be very difficult and problematic. With Windows 7, if you set up a Home group, then it can be easy to copy files from one machine to another over your internal network. That’s not limited by your internet speed, but the speed of your router and the computer’s network adapters. Regardless of your specific network speed it’s very likely to be much faster than your internet connection’s speed. The internet is not involved. Your external hard drive is not involved. You just set up your local networking so you can actually access a “share” on one machine from the other and you can then start copying files back and forth.
Unless your network is already set up I’d actually recommend the external drive solution. Unlike networking, it seems, it’s exceptionally simple to set up and get working.
Is it possible to link computers with a parallel cable for data tranmission? I seem to remember doing that with Dos6/Win3.1 years ago.
You know, I’m not sure. I know I still have a couple of the special cables for that down in my large collection of computer left-overs, but I’ve no idea if there’s any software to support that any more. Besides – what computers have parallel ports these days?
I expect the inquiry is about sending video content via email to a REMOTE address – not just to a local computer. Use Outlook (Hotmail) send as an attached file. 10 mb loads in 30 sec. On receipt just plays as a file. I do not know max file size but I would expect large as it is a cloud operation Errol.
Of course the file can be sent using DropBox, SkyDrive or Google Docs etc. I’ve done that myself. I have unlimited data transfer and 50,000 Mb ADSL. Most people have limited bandwidth. A full length video is normally between 700 MB and 5 GB. That would use up a significant part of people’s monthly bandwidth allocation That’s a lot, especially when you can carry the drive into the next room. I understand that someone might not want to move their portable hard drive. You have to untangle all the wires to get to the power supply ;-). Now that you can get a high capacity thumb drive for pocket change, that is probably the easiest solution.