Transfer wizard

May 19, 2007 by
Filed under: Uncategorized 

My work laptop has been getting more and more sick over the past few weeks (not booting, BSOD, weird behaviour, etc.) so I finally got a “temporary” replacement yesterday – if they can convince me it’s Windows that was sick not the hardware, then I’ll swap back, but booting problems (at least) aren’t usually caused by bad o/s.

My biggest challenge is moving all my stuff to its new home – I know I’ll have to reinstall all the programs and I thought I’d just drag the data file across the network, but my concern was all the little odds and ends that Windows hides in various places like the registry. Fortunately I remembered that XP (and maybe other versions too, but these are both on XP SP2) has the “Files and Settings Transfer Wizard” – I’ve not used it before but it sounds like it’s what I want.

I kicked it off just now (5:30am!) and was pleasantly surprised to see how simple it was – start the program on both PCs, tell them whether they’re the old (source) or new (target) machine, and they just get on with transfering stuff!

I have no idea how long this will take (the progress bar is not at all helpful) but I’ve only got one charger so I’ll have to keep an eye on their battery life and swap the mains power across as needed.

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Comments

4 Comments on Transfer wizard

  1. paul on Sun, 20th May 2007 9:10 am

    2. Tip#1: move all your music files first – this cut my transfer time from >2hrs to just a few minutes!

  2. paul on Sun, 20th May 2007 9:25 am

    3. To Do:

    1. back up the old work laptop (using BartPE and DeepBurner)
    2. remove my data/programs manually – I don’t think Ops would appreciate me using Darik’s Boot & Nuke like I did on our old laptop :)
  3. paul on Sun, 20th May 2007 12:00 pm

    4. 1. Done – 3 * DVD burned & checked
    2. Ongoing

    I don’t my Outlook data/config got copied across (by the Transfer Wizard) so that’s going to take some time to fix :(

  4. paul on Mon, 21st May 2007 7:25 am

    5. 2. Data & programs now deleted.

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