Over the years I’ve suffered many times through the process of installing programs and copying files to a new computer. WinXP has a file transfer wizard, but it only copies over files and folders, not programs.
Many years ago I used Laplink a couple of times (with an old, slow serial cable), but that was back when things were much simplier.
Just got a new laptop with WinXP Pro, and my desktop has WinXP Home. I’d like to get the laptop tweaked and set up exactly as the desktop is.
The new, very expensive Laplink purports to do exactly what I want with a USB 2.0 cable. Not only is it pricey, but it will only let you do it once, then if you want to do it again, have to buy another license. Bummer, but there does not seem to be anything else that transfers everything, screens, bookmarks, programs (except antispyware and antivirus), folders, files, etc.
I read some of the user reviews on amazon and other places, and while some people claim it went seamlessly, many, many others ran into horrendous problems. This inclues some very experienced users. They all said tech support sucks too (big surprise).
Anybody here had any experience with the current version of Laplink PCMover for XP? Good, bad or indifferent?
Seven year old OP with no responses… I guess it is safe to hijack…just ignore all of the stuff in post #1 that might be out of date.
I did a search on Laplink and didn’t get anything current which seems odd since there are so many semi-forced moves from XP machines and Laplink offers free usage under that situtation.
So I spent 4+ hours the other day doing it and I’m not really sure what I accomplished. My desktop looks familiar and alot of files did get transferred but the one thing I really wanted didn’t happen… transferring emails and addresses from Outlook Express to Outlook.
I never used that brand, but I can tell you that this one didn’t work for crap. All it transferred was the folders, none of their contents.
Turns out it did more than I thought.
Windows Live Mail was the key. First I installed it on the machine using XP and it automatically pulled in all of the OE messages. That didn’t accomplish what I needed but at least I saw how it was designed to work.
As soon as I installed WLM on the new laptop it found all of the messages that had been transferred during the Laplink process. Next step was to export those messages to Outlook and wa lah…
Now if I could only figure out how Outlook is using the Contacts… it doesn’t seem to be and what’s more it autofills email messages with address/names that I can’t even find.
Wow. Is Laplink still around? I remember using this software in the late 80’s early 90’s on MS-DOS machines. You linked you boxes together with a parallel port cable. Worked well, then.
Nope… over the internet using my wireless network.
My PC’s hard drive was failing and I needed to buy anew one. I bought Acronis to do it but as it happened a friend showed me how to do it without it and it worked like a charm.
Under Control Panel->Back up and Restore you have an option to create a system image and a system repair disk. First create a system repair disk and then create the system image. Creating the image took a few tries because the bad hard drive would sometimes crash in the middle but eventually it finished successfully.
Then on the new PC (or Hard Drive in my case), you put in the Repair Disk and it will prompt for the image (which was stored on a portable HD). The image restored and voila I had a clone of my PC that worked fine. I had three hiccups:
- The issues making the image I mentioned earlier.
- Apparently Dell PCs have a bug that makes Repair disks created on them unusable. I ended up having to find one on the Internet and use that one.
- Windows Search would not work on the new image. I discovered this was because the service wouldn’t start. It turned out this was because the new hard drive was bigger than the original and a bug in my Intel Chipset caused the problem. Updating the chipset driver fixed it. How those are related, I have no idea. You would not believe how much Googling it took to figure that one out.
I ended up returning the Acronis software unopened. I did not realize Windows had this tool built in but t worked great for me.
ETA: Somehow I missed you said you have XP. I am referring to Windows 7. Not sure if XP has the image option. Either way, maybe this post will help someone…
Imaging a hard drive for re-installation on a different PC is open to all kinds of driver issues you should be prepared ahead of time to deal with.
That said, everything you need to do it can be found on the System Rescue CD, which is what I use.