Product Review: by Bruce Preston Windows 7 has been out for several months now and has gotten favorable reviews. One minor inconvenience is that Microsoft did not provide an easy upgrade-in-place mechanism for those who skipped migrating to Vista. If you want to upgrade from XP, the hard disk is wiped clean prior to installing Windows 7. (Note: There is a mechanism for moving your files to an external hard disk and then restoring them after the installation, but I believe that it will not migrate applications.) Recently I had the opportunity to make use of an alternate migration method. Last week I got a call from an old friend who said that her 9-year old XP machine was making grinding sounds. She said that she had been thinking of getting a new desktop and it appeared that now was the time to do it. The concern was getting all of her applications and data moved to the new machine. We decided to leave the old machine running, as we couldn't be sure that it would start if we powered it off. She purchased a nice new desktop with Windows 7 Home Ultimate pre-installed. Now what about getting the data and applications moved over in short order? LapLink software has been around since the pre-Windows days. Their first product was LapLink and was used to synchronize a laptop computer with a desktop. Several years ago I made use of their then-new PCmover product to migrate from an old desktop to a new machine, and I was impressed by its ease of use and effectiveness. They now have multiple versions that understand Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7. The $19.95 version is for an in-place (i.e. same machine) upgrade from XP to Windows 7, but we wanted to do a machine transfer. Based upon their product matrix page on their web site we selected the "Pro" version. She purchased a single-use license and we then downloaded it to a flash drive, and then as per instructions, installed it on both machines. The license was then pasted into the 'from' machine's copy. PCmover gives you a choice of transport between the two machines: network, shared drive, recordable media such as CD or DVD, or even a LapLink cable. We selected “network” as we had already set up the new machine, gotten the network connection operational and installed 64-bit anti-virus. Other than that, the new machine was 'clean'. We started PCmover on the destination machine, and identified it as such and that we would be using a network transfer. It reported that it was waiting for a connection from a source machine. We then started PCmover on the source machine, and told it that we would be using the network connection. It found the target machine without our having to specify where it was, i.e. computer name or IP address. We selected “custom transfer” that let us specify which folders and applications were to be moved. We removed the check boxes from a number of obsolete applications, including the 32-bit version of the anti-virus software. We then pushed the button to start the transfer. It took about 5 minutes to build the manifest—the list of things to move. Once that was done it reported that it would take about 3 hours. We told it to proceed and left it running. About 3 hours later she returned to the machine and sure enough, there was her desktop wallpaper on the target machine with the appropriate icon/shortcuts. She poked around and found that her applications had moved, including Microsoft Office, synchronization with her Blackberry etc. Her folder structure resembled that of her old machine. I say resembled because of subtle changes in Windows 7—“My Documents” is now just plain "Documents" etc. All in all it was a very successful and stress-free transfer. |
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