Another PC migration trick

I thought this might be handy for some...

Had a interesting migration problem to sort yesterday. Some time ago, a customer had bought another company where the original owners were retiring, and with that purchase came some of their staff and computers.

One chap came with a very slow and creaky Dell SFF desktop running Win

10 home. Previously I had swapped out its HDD for a SSD to make less obnoxiously slow. That helped, but still left an irritation since being the Home edition it would not support being controlled by the standard remote desktop client - and this chap often works from home or sometimes overseas.

Now with EOL for Win 10 approaching I needed get him onto Win 11. The problem was the PC came preloaded with various bits of software that we had no way of re-installing such as a bespoke CRM system. While it could no longer connect to original data source, it did have a local cache of data that was worth keeping.

So I opted for the "move everything" approach described here:

That worked with surprisingly little difficulty, migrating from the old AMD based Dell to a new Intel i5 platform that was pre-loaded with Win

11 Pro. It needed three sets of drivers (motherboard management engine ones) downloaded from the new PCs motherboard manufacturer's web site. I also took the liberty of uninstalling all the Dell bloatware! After that we had a perfect clone of the old PC (just way faster).

The final piece of the puzzle was to upgrade it to Win 11, and then get it to switch itself to Win 11 Pro to take advantage of the licence that the new target PC came with.

Here is that process:

End result, complete clone with all apps, data, and settings, upgraded to Win 11 Pro.