Laplink PC mover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant

Laplink PC mover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant-PCmover Professional is a migration tool that can transfer not only documents and settings, but entire working applications from an older PC onto a new system. It works with almost all versions of Windows (although downgrading isn’t officially supported), and can even perform “in-place”; migrations – handy for moving a single computer between OS editions that can’t be directly upgraded.
The boxed version comes with a special double-ended USB cable for connecting your old and new PCs together, but if you’ve opted for the cheaper download edition, you can use an external hard disk to ferry your files across.
Alternatively, if both PCs are attached to a network, the software can transfer your data that way. Before copying, PCmover scans both source and destination PCs, identifying which files don’t need to be moved. The software can also warn you of potential application clashes or incompatibilities. The copying is a slow process, and it’s slowed down further by PCmover’s insistence on compressing everything.
It’s not a Microsoft product, so it does not work in the same way as the Transfer Wizard that can move from Vista to Windows 7. In fact, if you are moving from Windows XP to Windows 7 on the same PC it’s not a one-step process. There is a guide to doing this on the Laplink website. If you are moving to a new PC, you may also need to check the licences of the programs you are moving (the program warns about this too). You may not legally be allowed to move them.
We were sceptical of Laplink’s claims that the software would work as described, so we were pleasantly surprised when it did. The process failed the first time we tried it, as the program tried to copy data to the portable hard disk we were using for the job.
We diagnosed a faulty cable and tried again, this time directing it to copy files to a folder on the existing hard disk and then copy that folder to another computer (this does require having a lot of free hard disk space on the old computer).
You can also move everything by copying files over a home network or a USB cable. It was a little confusing going through the options. We found ourselves backtracking through the step-by-step wizard more than once to figure out what options we had ticked and where the program would be storing certain files. But the process was mainly painless. Our Desktop and most of the applications – even some of the troublesome ones – appeared on the new Windows 7.

Some programs, such as anti-virus, cannot be moved, and these will have to be installed manually. The program is available in two versions: the Pro edition that we looked at costs £42 and includes a USB cable to complete the transfer, while the Home edition without that is £28.
We would still prefer to do a fresh installation and then reinstall applications and copy documents to the new computer ourselves. This is the cleanest method and it’s good to start on a new computer afresh. But if you are upgrading an old Windows XP computer or you are missing installation disks for some programs, Laplink is a useful program.
Bear in mind that there is always a risk when running this sort of program – especially if you are changing operating systems on the same computer – so always have a backup of your files before you begin, and be aware that your experience may not be as smooth as ours. With a USB2 external hard disk, it took around four hours to move 30GB of data, and over 100Mbits/sec Ethernet the same load took more than a day. Your best bet is either a Gigabit LAN or the Laplink USB cable, either of which should work out around twice as fast. All our files and programs ended
up in their proper places, and we were impressed to see that even bespoke Visual Studio applications worked perfectly. If your transfer doesn’t go the way you want, you can roll back your new PC to its original state. In all, PCmover works just as it should, and certainly shows up the limitations of the free Windows Easy Transfer tool.
You can try Laplink PC mover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant, visit www.laplink.com/pcmover/pcmoverupgradeassistant.html