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From:Avanquest
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See Product Page
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User Rating: Amazon Sales Rank:#463 |
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3 of 3 customers found the following review helpful:
 Effective Software for Moving to a New PC, 2008-01-30
I do computer repair from time to time, not as a profession but to help out friends and family, and make a few extra dollars to help with tuition. My friend's employer, an accountant with a small (4-person) company called me and asked me to help him set up new machines and transfer the files and programs from the old to the new machines. His office computers were outdated and slow, some too slow to even run Quickbooks.
The move that I performed was from two old PCs (a Pentium 3 and a Pentium 4) onto two brand new machines (Athlon dual-core processors etc). All of the PCs were running Windows XP. In both cases, the old machines had quite a bit of legacy software (accounting stuff I haven't heard of before) for which there was no install disk available, hence the need for this type of migration software. I performed the transfer over an ethernet cross-over cable connected directly to both PCs.
Overall, I found the PCmover software to be easy to use and effective in moving the legacy and new software from one PC to another. It also transfered files easily and efficiently.
Pros:
- Simple, intuitive interface. Choose which programs you want to move, what files you want to move, and once the transfer is complete, which programs and services you would like to run on startup of the new PC (a feature that was not mentioned but very helpful).
- Windows Services are also transfered and configured. For example, the Quickbooks database service was transfered and started on the new PC.
- Most transfered software works immediately. In a few cases, I had to make a few minor adjustments to get software to run, though this mostly had to do with programs running over the network, not locally.
Cons:
- Can take a while, especially if you're moving a lot of files, but that's not the software's fault. If you have a gigabit ethernet card or find a USB 2.0 cable, it will speed up the process. The bigger of my two moves took 5 hours to move 24 GB of data.
- Cannot transfer antivirus software.
- Won't re-map network drives on the new machine.
- You will need to re-activate newer software (Office XP, Quickbooks 2008, in this case) with the key that comes with it. Older software isn't as defensive about things, and transfered without needing re-activation (Office 97, legacy accounting software).
- Licensing is per-move, not per-user. I had to pay for a key to use PCmover for each migration.
I would be happy to use PCmover again, and recommend it to friends who need to migrate to a new computer.
1 of 1 customers found the following review helpful:
Pretty good, 2008-01-12
All files transferred fine except my Outlook emails. None of my Outlook email moved to my new computer, but the settings did. Not a big deal. I just had to manually move the emails which took maybe 15minutes.
I thought my Windows settings would transfer (like what I want in my Start menu, what I want in my Tool Bar, etc), but they didn't.
4 of 4 customers found the following review helpful:
 Not for XP to Vista dispite what they say, 2008-01-07
I wasted a whole day transfering from XP to Vista and all the programs that I tried after the transfer said I had to reinstall. Even though I went through and uninstalled all the old programs I didn't want on the old computer there were still many that I missed. I ran my registry cleaner and there were 1500 errors. It may work well transtering XP to XP or Vista to Vista.
1 of 1 customers found the following review helpful:
 Worked like a champ! Buy with confidence!!, 2007-12-22
PCmover
My tale of woe began when my trusty HP Pavillion had a 2nd power supply failure, this time frying all communications support on the motherboard. After exhaustive and unsuccessful searching for any other way to repair the Pavillion, I resigned myself to the fact that, though it was otherwise working perfectly, it would never again communicate with anything outside itself. Bummer!
Dejected, forlorn and a little panicked I began my search for the trusty Laplink that I had used several times, years ago as a PC & Network Tech. Once I found it (via Google) I also found multiple versions and some unfortunate reviews. To boot, I was determined not to buy a ^&#@& Vista machine as a replacement - so I paid 3x's the price to order an HP/Compaq Business machine with XP Professional SP2.
The PC Mover box arrived quickly (my experience with Element 5 was good and uneventful). I ordered the box (including USB cable) because, as stated before, I was unable to use Network as the transfer method.
I did have a few minor issues - unable to build the preview due to failure to connect. I found online easily enough tech support to learn to reverse the ends of USB cable and try it again. Voila!! From there on it worked perfectly - as promised.
The only other warning I might offer other buyers is that the reported time left to complete the transfer operations continues to refigure itself, rendering it therefore unreliable as an estimate. But, it did complete after 13+ hours. So, I recommend doing this overnight if you have a computer that has been in use for a long time.
All of my applications were transferred without incident. A few of the companies have required me to re-purchase licenses for use on a different computer - but not the fault of Laplink.
A side note about the man who "lost his job" because of Laplink PCmover: In my experience Sony Viaos are notorious for being proprietary with their drivers and hardware/software interfaces. I'd suggest that his problems were ordained when he undertook to move a SONY VIAO to a Dell machine. I don't think his problems had anything to do with Laplink.
I say - buy and use with confidence. Great job, Laplink!!!
5 of 5 customers found the following review helpful:
Easy!, 2007-11-12
A few years ago, I migrated to a new machine using Aloha Bob's PC Relocator. Pure magic. Unfortunately, PC Relocator seems to have vanished off the market as part of a MS acquisition. Last year, I had to do another migration, which took literally days to do manually, even with the MS transfer utility.
This year, I needed to do the same, and took a chance on PC Mover which Dell is selling. I went from an XP desktop to a Vista notebook. Again, absolutely magic. Absolutely every program and customization, and I have some truly obscure ones, transferred perfectly. Control was excellent, as there were many programs which did not need to go to the new machine.
The only problem I had was in the method of transfer. I have an external HD which I use for backup on both machines. I first tried the method of writing the "moving van" to the HD from the old machine, and then reading if from the new one. Unfortunately, when I tried to read the data, I got an error message saying the file had an invalid header. Rather than trying again, I used the USB bridge cable, which worked flawlessly. One thing which speeds this up is that unlike some programs, PC Mover will take an inventory of the target machine, and selectively move only the programs and data needed, rather than a brute force transfer of all the data, and then sorting it out on the target computer.
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