Transfering programs and data to a new computer

Laplink is one of the companies (PCMover), Zinstall was their competitor, and Easeus is an also-ran. The reason I say that about Easeus, is attempts to use their "trial" or "free" thing, it couldn't even list all the things it was supposed to move. That's pretty critical, if you think you have written a PCTransfer program. You should be able to list what you propose moving in the way of Program Files. The transfer operation needs to selectively update the Registry on the new machine. It's more than just Program Files...

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The general terms for these things, are a "price per single usage of the program". If you are moving the Wallace PC to the new Gromit PC, that might cost you fifty or it might cost you a hundred. The prices have gone up on some of these things. They come with tech support. If your copy of Adobe Photoshop won't move, but your Mozilla Firefoz and Mozilla Thunderbird moved OK, you phone up their tech support, they remote in, and move the Adobe Photoshop from Wallace to Gromit for you. You never expect a transition to go smoothly (because some people collect a lot of junk and the junk programs may not follow any standards of installation).

The process doesn't have to be messy, but it is potentially messy. Adobe products might not "move" because of licensing issues (the transfer program might automatically know that Photoshop movement is not possible).

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Windows 10 and Windows 11 can be moved from machine to machine.

To successfully make such a transition, you want the two devices to share a disk driver. Maybe the MSAHCI driver will work the SATA drive on both machines.

Depending on what you are doing with Windows software, sometimes the computer has an NVMe drive, and the "storenvme" or whatever it is called, is not present, and the NVMe cannot be read at the time. You have to find a way of coaxing in the driver if that happens, by staging on a machine that has both a SATA (which will work) and an NVMe (which might not have a driver for it right now).

At some point, you can install Windows 11 over top of Windows 10. You can use a Rufus USB stick preparation program, to put the windows 11 installer ISO, onto a USB stick. And there are tick boxes to defeat some of the Microsoft annoyances while doing so.

As long as you have a thorough backup of the source disk, in case any sort of transition fails, you can roll back and try again.

0) Back up original Win10 disk! You will need space to store this image! For example, a disk I zapped a couple days ago, I needed 200GB storage for the .mring file. 1) Move Win10 disk to new Win11 machine, making Win10 the only disk drive. The factory W11 drive, put it aside for now. 2) Boot the new machine -- Win10 will appear on the screen after five minutes of driver-fluffing. It helps immensely if Win10 has a network driver for the Ethernet while Win10 is attempting to "driverize". I contacts Windows Update, to say, get an NVidia 700MB driver. 3) Reboot a couple times. Convince yourself (Device Manager) that the transition is complete. 4) Now, insert the Win11 ISO or Win11 DVD and do an Upgrade Install over the Win10 (run setup.exe off the virtual DVD). Since the machine has an MSDM key in the BIOS ACPI table, there are no worries about having a license key. Also, since the new machine has a TPM and it has 16GB of RAM and it has POPCNT instruction support, you won't need any Rufus tick boxes to defeat "issues" of that sort.

You might use Rufus USB stick for its "setup.exe", if you wanted to avoid an MSA account while installing. You can install a local account and add an MSA later. That ensures your username, appears as you would want it to be spelled and presented.

Paul

I have not tried using specific migration applications, but do frequently migrate stuff from one pc to another.

There are several approaches that can work depending on what kind of migration you want.

If you want a total migration - i.e. all the data, apps, the OS and all the settings, then you can usually "move"[1] the entire drive into the new pc (sometimes you may need to change the partition type before the new PC will boot from it[2]). Win 10 and later are actually very good at coping with having the entire hardware platform swapped out under them, and can often sort themselves out. Once old win 10 is installed onto the new hardware, it would be eligible for a free upgrade to Win 11.

Moving a whole install has pros and cons - you get to keep everything as it was, but that includes all the bits of annoying misconfigurations, cruft, and malware etc

If you are happy to re-install your apps, and want a nice clean machine to start with, then just migrating your data might be easier. For that, moving[3] the (most of the) content of c:\users\yourusername directory to the same space on the new one will shift all your files on the desktop and in the docs folder, music, video, and pictures folder.

If you want to shift a whole Thunderbird install, then that is in the (normally hidden) %appdata% folder (you can type that into the address bar to ger there - it will usually take you to c:\users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming. Move the whole Thunderbird folder to the new PC in the same location, before you run TB on the new PC - it should pop back with all accounts and settings as you left it.

For things like web history, passwords etc; you can either "export" them to a file on the old machine and import on the new one. Of if the browser is logged into an accounts (MS, Google, Mozilla etc), then turning on Synch will allow all of it to automatically be restored onto other machines when you login with the same browser account on them.

[1] You might be able to physically do that, but you would be better cloning the source onto a new spare drive of a type appropriate for the new one. Then you can swap out the new PCs drive for your clone. If stuff goes wrong, you can always get back to square one. [2] Old Master Boot Record drives (MBR) may not boot on new PCs with a UEFI firmware BIOS - that may require the partition to be updated to a GUID Partition Table (GPT). Many bits of cloning software can do this on the fly when copying, alternatively there is a standard tool in windows that can do it called MBR2GPT.exe. [3] Can use an external drive, or share via network if both on the same one. I often to the latter; and find it easier to do from the command line:

Set NTFS permissions for access in an "Administrator" command prompt:

So to share the user folder on the old machine:

"net share Source="C:\Users\yourusername" /grant:Username,FULL"

The set NTFS permissions for access to all the files:

"icacls "C:\Users\yourusername" /grant Username:(OI)(CI)F /T /C"

The "Username" should be that of a user on the source PC. When you try to connect to that share on the new PC it will usually prompt for the username and password that applies on the old PC. (Note new Win 11 Pro PCs will block access to shares that don't have a username and password associated with the shared resource). To access the share, start at the Network group on the new machine (enable network and file sharing if it asks - and make network private), double click on the old machine, and will will prompt for credentials. Once entered you should see a folder called "Source" with all your stuff in it.

Perhaps we should do a wiki page for DIY data migration?

Yes please. I don't have to migrate data very often so a wiki would be very useful.

May I echo that - I have done such migrations in the past with only moderate problems, but only every N years, and my memory of what I did last time doesn't last quite as long.

Laplink used to be free. I have used it before to migrate systems. However I recently migrated an old laptop to a new laptop and it did work pretty well. Despite the old laptop being W10 32 bit and the new one being W11 64 bit.

There was a cost, however.

I absorbed the cost because I had no idea until I tried it out, and hadn't told my friend there would be any cost.

The charge covers a single migration, but seemed worth it. Below £100 but not by very much, IIRC.

HTH

Dave R

It needs thinking through as to how much can be migrated. It is usually better to do a clean install of the OS which means programs which rely on the registry will usually need installing (with some interesting exceptions - including MSFT apps). Programs that don't use the registry can just be copied and data copied back from the backups.

I have several programs that need to be un-installed while online which frees up the licence for a re-install.

Be interesting to start from a suggested/recommended layout (e.g. no data on the OS partition) and how to get there.

For every computer we have (6 desktops, 4 servers, and a development system) I have a hardback A4 logbook. Everything gets noted in there, and I can refer back years (some machines are on volume 3). It works well.

Yes, I keep notes but they tend to be generalisations. For instructions from web pages, I copy the text into notepad. Unless there are reasons not to, cloning is so much easier.

+++ Me too

Thanks, David, that looks like what I'm looking for.

I'll investigate in more detail.