sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Computers & Programming Computers, Software, Accessories Transferring Entire Contents

My current HP laptop is failing after many years of use. It is running on the most current version of Windows 10. I have purchased a new one that has Windows 11 on it. I'd like to transfer the entire contents of the old one to the new one, hopefully through a direct connection, using something to the XCopy function in DOS. Am I fooling myself into believing that it really can be that simple? I need many of the proprietary programs to be included in this transfer since many are no longer available. Any guidance or advice would be greatly appreciated.

If you can copy the drive from the old machine to a new one using something like Macrium Reflect, then install the copy in your new laptop you might be off to the races. You could then upgrade from Windows 10 to 11 and hopefully not lose any of your installed programs (although some might quit working).

Things turned out to be much better than expected. Not perfect, but so much better. I know that IT professionals won't approve, but it turns out that I am using MS Edge as a browser and also "One Drive" cloud storage. The only thing, I mean the ONLY thing that I had to do was give the laptop my e-mail address, which also is an MS product: Office 365. Once I signed into my account, I began seeing almost instant population of existing programs and apps. A lot of desktop icons didn't show up, but those were minor. Still, between these MS products working in harmony, there wasn't much to do in transferring to the new laptop except to sit back and watch. Even more amazingly, I came back later to resume some customizing and noticed the missing icons (and their associated programs) were now right there and working. One program is a very old DOS-based utility and it fired right up on the first try.

In my travels, I don't think I've ever heard an IT person say anything nice about Microsoft. I will say from an end-user's perspective, with very little computer experience, I'll swear by it. I just thought I'd let everybody know in case they are interested. Comments or advice is still welcome and appreciated.

If any of those programs are installed on the machine you can't just copy them over. They will have to be installed on the new machine using the original installer and hopefully the installer and program are compatible with Windows 11.

I usually just use a large thumb drive to move files over. You could network the two machines too and simply drag and drop from one drive to the other.

-Hal