Transfer Files to New Computer
It may of taken you a while but you finally broke down and got yourself a new computer. You brought it home and fired it up and thought you were all ready to but then you realized all your program discs are lost and gone and your files are still on your old computer.
Not to worry you have a few different options here. The simplest one will of course cost you money. Pcmover is the leading data transfer software on the market. It is the only program on the market that actually transfers over programs as well as personal files and user accounts. You can read more about this software on there website at http://www.laplink.com/Pcmover/
Besides special software we already mentioned the using the Windows Transfer wizard and have a full step by step guide on how to use this over at our how to transfer files site. This built in feature is not all that hard to use but it does lack many options that Pcmover has.
If you want and many people do you can just make a fresh start and just manually copy over the files you want onto a USB hard drive or CD and then copy it onto your new computer were ever you want it. The biggest down side of this is you will not be able to transfer over the user account settings. So you would have to re-create the user accounts. Another negative aspect is finding were to place some of the files like your favorite list our your outlook data file if you use that. This method really should only be used if you just want to transfer over a few personal files and not user settings or account information.
As you can see you have several options out there. Pick the one that works best for you and you will be up in no time.
May 10th, 2008 at 2:55 am
Thanks for recommending the laplink software. It worked perfect at transfering over my office program as well as user account. I had almost no downtime with my new Vista system.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:23 am
Man this made the whole process so much easier.
June 19th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
I have been trying for 2 days to transfer my data from XP to Vista. I have no problem getting it going, but after 4 hours yesterday it reached a certain file and just sat there for 2 hours. This is the 2nd time I’ve re started it and both times it stopped. I installed my programs on the new computer because it only transfers data right? Any idea why I’m having a problem?
June 19th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Michelle,
You are not alone in having this issue. There are many different reason for this happening. How are you doing the data transfer? Network, external device, easy transfer cable? We need to know this in order to help.
I would transfer over only the user settings first. Then choose only a third of the files you want to transfer over, rinse and repeat till all files are transfered.