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Replacing my Vista laptop - how do I transfer my programs / data

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by ateksystems 1 view

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I'm replacing my laptop soon and going from Vista Ultimate to Vista Ultimate or Business (not sure which yet). I have, by laptop standards, a huge amount of material to transfer - maybe 500 applications including music composition software, software development tools, internet development tools etc., Windows Mail messages and settings, Outlook Mail and Calendar settings/data for multiple identities, Tens of thousands of registry entries, not all of which are keepers, but thousands are. How do I do this and not lose critical stuff? I'm a software developer and I SHOULD know this type of stuff but I don't!

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by older mycroft

Were you to be renewing or upgrading your HDD to reinsert it back into your existing laptop, then that could be accomplished by cloning your existing HDD and transferring the image to the new HDD.

However, you are talking about transferring your existing HDD image to a new machine altogether - and that won't work. Just as you cannot remove a HDD from one computer and put it in another computer expecting it to work exactly the same.

Registry entries only carry validity for programs that have been installed ON that machine. You cannot transfer your 500 programs installed on the old machine to the new machine - you will have to install them again on the new machine to allow the registry entries to be formed from within the new registry.

As for your data, you can save that off to an optical disc or a thumb drive and copy it all over once there is a receptor program installed. You mail messages and settings can be EXPORTED from their existing programs, then IMPORTED into the new system's email client.

Alternatively, you could remove the HDD from the old machine, fit it to a USB caddy, then read the data from it straight into the new machine, then return the HDD to the old machine before wiping it.

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