Migrating from WinXP to Win7

[Gary]

My wife is about to migrate her XP laptop to a new laptop winning Win7.
What migration schemes work best? Are there any programs that do most
of the work if migrating data and programs?

 

[Thee Chicago Wolf [MVP]]

My wife is about to migrate her XP laptop to a new laptop winning Win7.

What migration schemes work best? Are there any programs that do most
of the work if migrating data and programs?

Windows 7 has "Windows Easy Transfer" which ought to do the trick.
Windows 7 has File and Settings Transfer wizard which is ok. If you
can connect your old system and new system to a network where they can
talk to each other, it's a breeze. Otherwise, I'd recommend getting a
large flash drive and just manually migrate your data.

- Thee Chicago Wolf [MVP]

 

[Brian Cryer]

Windows 7 has "Windows Easy Transfer" which ought to do the trick.
Windows 7 has File and Settings Transfer wizard which is ok. If you
can connect your old system and new system to a network where they can
talk to each other, it's a breeze. Otherwise, I'd recommend getting a
large flash drive and just manually migrate your data.

- Thee Chicago Wolf [MVP]

I agree the transfer wizard does make it easy (in my experience). However,
I'd also ensure you have everything backed up before hand. It wouldn't be
nice to find a month down the line that it had missed something important.
Also be aware that it won't transfer applications and whilst it seems to do
a good job with many application settings, some applications it doesn't know
about so you will probably end up needing to transfer some settings manually
(even if data went across).

 

[Howard]

I agree the transfer wizard does make it easy (in my experience). However,
I'd also ensure you have everything backed up before hand. It wouldn't be
nice to find a month down the line that it had missed something important.
Also be aware that it won't transfer applications and whilst it seems to do
a good job with many application settings, some applications it doesn't know
about so you will probably end up needing to transfer some settings manually
(even if data went across).

Take a look at Laplink PcMover available on Amazon. It will actually
migrate most of your programs without having to reinstall them.

 

[Student]

I agree the transfer wizard does make it easy (in my experience). However,
I'd also ensure you have everything backed up before hand.

I want to relate my story on use of transfer wizard in win xp

My friends computer started taking about 5 minutes to boot up. ?virus

It was a Dell with xp home

I used the transfer wizard to copy the data to a new partition created on the
comuter with one of Acronis programs.

I installed xp home version 3 on this computer. The boot time came down to 40 seconds
on the older hard disk.

The transfer wizard from version 3 would not work on the data that I had collected
with version 1 xp home wizard.

I had to find a shareware program to get out of this predicament.

http://www.fastimgwiz.com/

I will not use the transfer wizard from windows in future.

ES

 

[Marty]

I used the Laplink Win 7 Migration assistant on
3 machines with good results.
Marty

 

[Ken Blake]

I used the Laplink Win 7 Migration assistant on
3 machines with good results.

Although I don't really recommend the following, I wanted to mention
it as a possibility:

You can't upgrade from XP to Windows 7, but you *can* do a two-step
upgrade--first from XP to Vista, then from Vista to 7.

I don't recommend it because it doubles whatever risk of problems
there is in upgrading. But I've personally done this once, and it
worked fine.

 

[Thee Chicago Wolf (MVP)]

I agree the transfer wizard does make it easy (in my experience). However,

I want to relate my story on use of transfer wizard in win xp

My friends computer started taking about 5 minutes to boot up. ?virus

It was a Dell with xp home

I used the transfer wizard to copy the data to a new partition created on the
comuter with one of Acronis programs.

I installed xp home version 3 on this computer. The boot time came down to 40 seconds
on the older hard disk.

The transfer wizard from version 3 would not work on the data that I had collected
with version 1 xp home wizard.

I had to find a shareware program to get out of this predicament.

http://www.fastimgwiz.com/

I will not use the transfer wizard from windows in future.

It failed because a patch was released to fix the Transfer Wizard.

 

[Doum]

Although I don't really recommend the following, I wanted to mention
it as a possibility:

You can't upgrade from XP to Windows 7, but you *can* do a two-step
upgrade--first from XP to Vista, then from Vista to 7.

I don't recommend it because it doubles whatever risk of problems
there is in upgrading. But I've personally done this once, and it
worked fine.

The OP used the term migrating but the way I understand it is his wife is
getting a new laptop with Win7 and wants to "migrate" programs and data.