Transfering Laptop Contents

You can buy suitable USB data transfer cables.

If both laptops are connected to the same (broadband) router you should be able to transfer data. You could also do this just using an RJ45 cable if both laptops have sockets. If neither laptop is RJ45 port auto sensing you would need to use a cross over cable. Both laptops would need to be configured with fixed IP addresses. Taking a harddrive out of a laptop and attaching it to a desktop is another possibility which may not be to difficult.

I presume that you don't own a NAS!

Swap disks and input the license code when requested?

If you don't know the codes you can find them by downloading, installing and pruning Belearc Advisor, which is free.

This might help:

I'd certainly try that first.

Otherwise see here

You might get away with a drive swap - but windows might blues screen if the hardware is too radically different.

Reactivation will normally be ok if its not been done for a few months. They are probably of the vintage where the product keys on the stickers have not actually been used anyway - so entering one during a reinstall would look like a new key to the activation system.

As for fastest way to shift stuff, if you don't fancy a drive swap, then get a USB to SATA adaptor (you can use the smarts from an external drive caddy if you like), mount the old drive on the new and copy what you need. That would not trasfer apps though, which would need a reinstall.

If you want a drive swap and a performance boost, then use the USB adaptor to mount a new SSD on the old machine, and clone its drive to the SSD. Then install that in the new machine.

(that way you get the added performance from the SSD, and don't end up messing up you bootable copy of windows on the old drive)

Success !

I just swapped the hard drives between the laptops. Both started up with no complaints but when I looked in Control Panel / System the new laptop with the old drive came up with '3 days to activate' - I gave it the COA number from the old laptop and it activated happily. Oddly the old laptop with the new drive said it was quite happy thank-you !

Andrew

There are several. I chose a paid for one which could harvest the license codes for a wide range of software some of which I had long since lost the packaging for. It did a demo version which showed partial decodes and then when you paid up it provided full info. They worked.

I would recommend doing this as an insurance policy when moving hardware radically with installed software in case any of them are cunning and bind themselves to the ethernet adapter ID when first installed (or some other hardware signature). Expensive software tends to do this...

Moving data is trivial but moving fully installed and protected programs can be interesting (Chinese usage) depending on your technical skills.

Nirsoft Produkey is good at this and free.

Well that's a result!

Now buy a mouse for the one with the broken touch pad :)

Andy