My current machine is struggling with the demands of lockdown so I think I will retire it to a farm in the country soon. I need advice on the best way to move all the installed stuff and the data to the new computer.
ATM: Moving to a new PC
by 36 Comments
It’s Windows 10 Pro. All the data is on a 2nd disk partition, so I’d like to have a partioned drive too.
Thanks in advance, tout le monde.
1) Get the new machine up and running.
I’d have Windows 10 Pro installed on an SSD rather than an old style hard drive. Have the SSD big enough for the operating system with room to spare, but stick all of your data on a separate physical drive, either internal or on the end of a USB cable. Use a conventional hard drive for that – they last longer and the price per Gb is much lower; you can give yourself a massive storage increase at the same time.
2) Copy all of the data from your current 2nd partititon onto the new data drive.
You can do this several different ways.
Option A: You can stick your new data drive into a caddy and hang it off the old machine; copy from old PC data partition to new drive, then stuff the new drive back in the new machine.
Option B: pay for some transfer software and just connect old PC to new PC with a simple USB cable, transfer from old drive to new drive with both in situ.
Option C: The complement of option A – hoik the old drive out of the old PC and stick it in a caddy attached to the new machine, copy everything from the old data drive to the new data drive.
Once you’re happy (test, test, test) that you’ve got all of the data onto the new drive, you can either repurpose the old drive as an external back-up drive (in a caddy) or just bung the old disk away after subjecting it to purposeful* deletion.
I’m sure there are other ways forward, but those options are what spring to mind off the top of my head.
*for purposeful deletion I usually use a four pound lump hammer and two or three good blows.
As an addendum – whilst I agree that using and external hard drive for data is both cheaper and lasts longer, DO NOT assume that as it’s an external “backup” drive it will last forever and your data is safe – ALWAYS have a backup of anything important and have the attitude of ‘when’ the hard drive will fail not ‘if’.
I say this as someone who recently retired from 20 years working at a hard drive company. The disk drive industry did a great job of selling external drives as safe backups when they first came out and it was true initially when people used them as backups to their data being on the PC. However as people moved to using external drives as primary storage, this mentality / perception continued……. Hard Drives are a mechanical system with many tiny magnetic heads flying across the disk at a height of less than a human hair whilst it is spinning at 7200 rpm (or sometimes more). Whilst most do have a lifetime (and warranty of >3 to 5 yrs, that is no consolation when it’s your data that is lost. ALWAYS have a backup.
Lecture over.
PS, as regards “all the installed stuff” I imagine you mean the applications rather than the data.
Unless you have either original installation discs and/or licence keys etc. you’ll not be able to easily move things across unless you use a disc cloner of some sort (and even then it may not work seamlessly, depending upon how the software polices its own installation).
Take a look at O&O Disc Image – there may well be a free version available that will do what you need.
I’d have a butchers at a copy of PCPro magazine in WH Smiths – they often offer last year’s version of either that or something very similar in their “free” software offer (you’ll need to buy a copy of the free software version of the mag to get a code to grab any of the “free” software (*cough* the key string is printed on the spine of the mag). I have a sub to the mag, so let me know if you want to grab any specific utilities from that source – I can grab them for you.
You might also want to grab a copy of MyKeyFinder (caution downloading it – always scan before running, or you might be getting more than you want installed) if you know there is software installed for which you can’t find/remember the licence keys. It’ll generate a long text document with all the software keys it can find within the OS registry; very handy.
Thanks VV. It is the old apps that are the issue and that means I would need to do an image copy.
I’d imagine that any new machine will have a Windows install already present. So does O&O allow you to “overwrite” an image once you’ve gone through the mandatory Microsoft account setups on the new box?
Applications like Disk Image are designed to make a clone of an existing disk or partition; they are aimed at people who want to, for example, upgrade a machine by bunging in a much bigger internal drive. You’d maybe clone the disk/partition with the OS installed, and then re-partition the new disc afterwards to meet your requirements.
For example, say you have a machine with just a single 500Gb hard drive – it’s got Windows as the c: partition and a d: partition full of spreadsheets let’s say.
You get the idea you can spend £100 and quadruple the storage space, so you clone your exisitng drive onto the new larger disc, and then use a partitioning tool to either stretch the d: partition to fill the disk, or add one or more other partitions each with a separate drive letter.
The crucial thing is that your new disc will retain the same Windows installation as before, with the same licence key in place. That’s the usp as far as many users will be concerned; they pay for a fatter disc drive, but avoid having pay for a new Windows licence. If avoiding that cost isn’t an issue, you have more room for manouvre!
Cheers. I thought Microsoft had tied the OS into machines at the motherboard/BIOS level, didn’t know you could get round it…
They’ve quietly relaxed their approach (having been – rightly – roasted by many for their draconian behaviour in the past). It’s still perfectly possible to use a Windows 7 Pro licence key (retrieved from the machine as per the advice above) to “activate” a fresh install of Windows 10 Pro, for example; I’ve done it twice in the last year myself.
I’ve just been trying to use O&O image in order to simply upgrade the an SSD from one (interface) technology to another. All other hardware in the laptop is unchanged but it won’t do it. I tried the free Acronis cloner that can be used if you have the right manufacturers hard drive installed with identical results. I’m pretty sure if I’d not been changing hardware, I would have been OK.
Talking of PC Pro, this month’s ‘freebie’ is Laplink PC Mover express which claims to create a file that can be used to transfer all the configurations of installed packages from one PC to another. It looks like it’ll do the job but you do need to be able to install all the applications first. There’s an upgrade available (about £25 I think) that reckons it’ll move the whole application from one PC to another. If time is money or even if you would need to buy one package again because you’ve lost the discs or the download code, that’s money well spent even if you only use it once.
I’m going to piggy back on this thread with a question…….
I have a laptop that died last year – it just doesn’t charge up. It’s not a brilliant laptop or anything, and quite old, so I don’t really want to pay to fix it. But there are a few files (photos, music) I’d like to transfer to another PC.
Is there an easy way to do that? It’s Windows 7… I THINK… and it’s a hard drive, not SSD. Can I just remove the hard drive and get a cable to connect it to my PC and move everything across?
Sorry, how rude to interrupt someone else’s thread! Please answer Escher before me!
The quick answer is yes – you should be able to pull out the hard drive and transfer the files (and should be regardless of whether it’s Windows 7, 10 or 3.1). The easiest way is to get an external USB case, put the drive in this and attach to another PC via USB – it should just appear as an external drive.
The main difficulty I can foresee is that some laptop drives are a bugger to remove – glued in, 10 million screws etc etc
Thanks! I will give it a go when I have a spare moment. It’s been sitting gathering dust for a few months.
And no, I didn’t back it up….:)
@Arthur-Cowslip if it just won’t charge up, the obvious next question is whether it works when simply plugged into the mains?
If so, can’t you just copy the photos and music you want to keep onto a USB stick or burn them onto a CD-R or DVD-R (if it has an optical drive, that is)?
If you just need a means to carry the files across to another machine, I can mail you a handy 320Gb drive in a caddy that plugs in via USB. I had it attached to my telly for ages for pausing live TV (which fried the drive!) and then only recently I bought a refurbed 320Gb 2.5in SATA drive for a tenner on eBay and stuffed that into the caddy instead – you’re welcome to borrow it if it’ll do the trick. PM me if so.
Sorry, no, it doesn’t power up at all even when plugged in, should have been clearer.
Thanks for the offer – will get back to you if I need it!
Have you tried using a different power supply on your laptop? Same voltage etc. obviously.
It could just be that the PSU has died, in which case it would stop charging the battery.
A variant problem from above: I have a USB hub so I csn have several external drives running in parallel. The bugger only recognises one in it, even though there are several. It didn’t come with a disc so assume it runs on a driver already in Windows. But how do I get the blasted thing to recognise all the things plugged in?
Confucius he say cheapo USB gizmos from Chinaman very inscrutable in function. Many have strange ways. He say buy proper hub and save time overall.
If you have space in your PC box, buy an internal USB PCIe card from a known brand. Many have 4 USB connections in a single PCIe slot. You might even be able to find one which is USB.org certified.
I once went on a USB 2.0 designer’s training course. It started with “USB 2.0 shouldn’t really work. In practice, it is very easy to get wrong and nearly impossible to get right.” My last 15 years of working with it would suggest the above statement is largely true.
many thanks vulps n fentsteve
I have a MacBook Air and an iMac, both running for years (the iMac continuously) with no problems, if that’s any help.
EDIT: Wupes.
There’s always one. That other fella will be along in a minute.
Get a FiiO!
(…..still a thing, yes?)
Psst… I had a Fiio before him 😉
During my time out of mind I bought one.
Kerching! More commission for his maj.
We’re about to get lazy generalisations about Mac haters’ fashion habits etc I’ll wager.
Mac lovers have immoderately sized penises.
So beautifully designed. Just incompatible with anything else.
They only need to be compatible with a few things, if you don’t count farm machinery.
No Flash.
Just as well.
I refer you to the tags in the OP
Ah-HAH!!!!! I don’t think I would have posted this comment if you hadn’t sewn those tags on. So nyer.
I’d probably rather move house than move to a new PC.
Agree with the tags BTW. I’m trapped on a Mac Mini for music which I’d love to escape but I can’t face migrating off it.
I went through two mac minis that I used as my music servers until the next generation was £500 more than a PC that would do the same thing. I exported the iTunes library and bulk editted the paths the files (Notepad++ is the utility to use) and pointed the Windows iTunes at it. The only thing I lost was the statistics which I never use anyway. As I use it as my Sonos source, I just changed the id of my new PC to be the same as the Mac and the Sonos was none the wiser.
If you’re copying, moving or streaming music or video files between machines, the machines don’t care what operating system, file system or hardware the other one is, as long as the files are readable.
But the it’s likely that if you’ve started on a Mac-Mini you’ve organised your library in iTunes and you may have playlists etc that you want to use. I personally like the way itunes helps me arrange things (I know that’s not universal!) so I wanted to stick with it. However, as you say, when I point my Sonos system at the computer, it doesn’t care a jot…. the main thing then was maintaining the same computer ID so that the Sonos playlists still worked – the Sonos ecosystem is very fragile and libraries can’t be properly backed up or editted in bulk…. and even when they can be, they can’t be re-imported.