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Unless you’re new to the world of PCs you’ll remember Laplink’s data transfer software, one of the earliest and most straightforward ways to transfer data and files directly between two machines.
PCmover is
Laplink’s
modern day Vista-compatible equivalent, intended to completely transfer
programs, files and settings from a source machine to any number of destination
terminals.
It’s a fairly straightforward piece of software supplied with a Laplink USB2
cable.
It’s worth noting that once you set up the software and register, you tie up the PC as the sole source machine.
You can set up copies on as many destination machines as you want though, and we see it most likely being in a network environment to set up a range of similarly configured PCs.
If you follow the instructions carefully it’s straightforward to install the software and get the cloning process underway, although we were disappointed at how little control you have over what’s transferred.
There are a few settings for more advanced users and you can choose which drives to copy across, but you don’t have much control over individual files or folders, or which elements of your Windows environment you want moved.
With the process underway we transferred around 40GB of data in two hours through via USB2. This isn’t a bad time, especially considering you’d often be copying a lot less.
Once the transfer is complete, you’d expect to simply restart the new machine and then be looking at a clone of your source machine. However, there were a number of issues with our freshly cloned PC.
To start with it’s more of a merge than a clone. Start Menu and Desktop items were present from both machines.
The biggest problem was that most of the applications that are now ‘installed’ from the old PC wouldn’t work, complaining about invalid installations or registry entries and requesting a reinstall.
In fact the only thing that did seem to be okay was the file structure, and you can handle this yourself by straight copying files and folders.
Based on our experience with Windows, we’d expect, over time, to encounter other problems with improperly transferred contents.
While the transition appeared to be fairly smooth, the end result certainly gives you this impression.
Not wanting to spend the next few days reinstalling applications, we attempted to run the ‘roll-back’ routine supplied with the software, only to see our machine reboot to what was apparently exactly the same state.
Running it again seemed to get things back to normal but overall it was a
frustrating experience.
There is an additional synchronisation tool on the disc, and while this appeared
to work in our tests, we wouldn’t like to rely on it based on the behaviour of
the main application.
We came to the conclusion that while it may take a little more effort, it’s far safer to just install Windows and whatever applications you need from scratch, as you would usually do, rather than rely on PCmover.
While the software may be a tad more stable with a less cluttered system than the one we used, we still wouldn’t advocate using it over the small amount of extra legwork required to perform the process manually.
Also consider:
Group Test: Drive imaging software
We check out the best migration software available
O&O Disk Image
Keep complete copies of hard drives to prevent against data loss
Orlogix Replace MyPC Suite
Transfer data from one PC to another, while securely erasing files from your old
hard drive
All Backup Tools
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