Migrate your programs and settings from your old computer to a new computer

Back in the days of Windows 95 I bought a program called PowerQuest Drive Image. Drive Image allowed me to take snapshots of my entire hard drive and save them to other hard drives, to be used to recover a failed master hard disk. Drive Image contained a fabulous utility named Magic Mover, which allowed me to move entire programs, with all of their settings and distributed system files, from one PC, or partition, to another. Unfortunately, Powerquest is no more, along with Magic Mover.

While answering questions on a computers section of a specialty forum, where I act as moderator, a member asked questions about moving programs, settings and preferences from his XP computer to his new Vista computer. Another member pointed him to the Windows Vista "Easy Transfer" utility, which can "move" a number of programs, which it knows about, from an XP computer to the Vista computer, over a cable or network connection.

Unfortunately, the original poster had programs he wanted moved, but are not listed in the Easy Transfer database. That's when another member mentioned a program by LapLink, called PCMover. This program can indeed move any or all of your programs, files, settings, or desktops, between two computers running Windows 95, 98, NT, Me, 2000, Media Center, XP, or Vista. Instead of taking one or more days to migrate all of your programs and settings, you can do this with PCMover in a few hours, or less.

PCmover can migrate your PC across a network, Laplink USB cable, Laplink parallel cable, Windows Easy Transfer Cable, or any type of removable media that can be read by both PCs. If your computer has multiple users, PCmover gives you the option to migrate some or all of the users at once. The security information about file ownership and access control is preserved for each user. You can even use PCmover to migrate your PC to an Intel-based Mac!

A single license of PCmover ($49.95) allows you to migrate from a single old (source) PC to a single new (destination) PC. Additional migrations require the purchase of additional licenses. For most end users this is not a problem, since they rarely have to perform such major transfers of programs. There is significant discount pricing available from LapLink, for people or businesses requiring multiple computer migrations, in 5 or 10 packs of migration licenses. Upon payment of a migration fee, the software transfers files and settings from your old computer to your new computer.

You can read more about PCMover - here.