Laplink PCmover Upgrade assistant

Hey all!

Just found an interesting program. Laplink has come up with a system that will move all of you Windows XP programs to your new Windows 7 install. I haven't used this yet. I did clean installs on all of my machines, but I have a friend that wants me to help him with trying this next week when he gets his copy of Windows 7. I told him I thought he might be better off with a clean install, but since we've already backed up his data for doing a clean install, he wants to try this to see how it works, knowing if its not satisfactory, we'll go ahead and wipe the drive and do a clean install. I've looked through the program. You run it from your xp boot. Then run a custom install of windows7 but don't format the drive. Reinstall the program and run it and it will restore the programs to Windows7. Here is the link if anyone wants to check it out. I think it may be worth a try for less than $20.

Laplink Software - PCmover Upgrade Assistant - Migrate Computer Programs, Files and Settings

I also bought the program to go from Vista Ultimate to Win 7 Professional.

I too will give it a go. If it doesn't work, I will restore Vista using windows.old etc and then do the upgrade using EFT.

Let us know how you make out.

OK. I just used Laplink PC Mover and upgraded a Windows XP SP3 (32 bit) machine to Windows7 home premium x64. It went surprisingly well! Microsoft Office 2003 works fine. Quicken works fine. The only thing that had a glitch at all was "Elf Bowling". The game says that a file is missing when it tries to switch video modes. For $19.00, this program saves at least a day of reinstalling applications. The process was pretty straight-forward. You run PC Mover on your XP machine. It creates a file in a new directory on the C drive. I then booted the machine from 64 bit version of Windows 7 home premium. Do a custom install to the C drive and do not format. After Windows7 is up and running, reinstall Laplink PC Mover. Run it and it took about 45 minutes and all the programs that were on the XP machine are now working on the Windows 7 machine. I'll update this if any problems crop up but so far it looks good.

I purchased the program and will be using it to go from Vista Ultimate to Win 7 Professional tomorrow. I am encouraged.

I hope it goes as well for me. I too will report back on my results.

I almost paniced during the reinstall of PC Mover. When I first ran it in XP, I had to put in my registration key. This was in an email in Outlook. I should have thought to write that down because after installing Windows7, you have to reinstall PC Mover. I thought it would ask for my registration info again, but it didn't. It must keep it within the program file (which for me was on a separate partition. Good luck. I look forward to your report.

In my prep, I printed off pages 2, 10-14 of the pdf and affixed a sticky with the registration number.

I do have a question.

Were you given the opportunity to format? I know we do not. That is the only unknown I have at this time.

I have backed up my data partitions and will be making an image of the C: drive to my external drive.

Sounds like you've prepared well! When you do the "custom" install of Windows 7, it will ask you which partition you want to put it on. Tip: Label your partitions before you start the upgrade so you can easily identify the proper partition. In my case, I had 3 partitions (C: (system), D: (programs), E: (data)). When the 7 setup gets to this step, it will display the partitions as, "Disk 0, partition 1, Disk 0, partition 2, etc. If you have labeled your system partition it will show up as something like "Disk0, partition 1 (system), making it easier to identify where you want the install to go. Now for your question, I think you could click something around this step to do a format, however, the install never specifically asked me if I'd like to format.

I am running Win 7. The upgrade ran successfully and Lablink ran without errors.

I am now in the process of going through each application to verify that I can still run.

Outlook is running and I knew I would need to re-add the passwords.

I will report back in a few hours.

The only software that needed a repair was Winzip. Also I had to reset the pointer to My Documents which is on my D: drive.

The laplink program worked extremely well. Themoney spent was well worth the fact that I did not have to re-install and register all my software.

I want to thank you for starting this topic. That is how I learned about Laplink.

No problem Seymour! I'd like to cross post to more forums as I think this inexpensive piece of software would nudge many reluctant XP users to make the change to 7. I pretty much always advocated a clean install (with format) to make sure that any "garbage" gets purged but I must say that Laplink PCMover seems to do a great job of "upgrading" from XP. I'm going to use it next to take a laptop running Windows7 professional x86 (not activated) and install Windows7 home premium x64 retail. I'll see how it goes and keep you posted!