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Notebooks.com
- Josh Smith
Oct 22, 2009
Link to article
Windows 7 is officially out which means it’s time to think about upgrading. Unfortunately upgrading
from Windows XP to Windows 7 is made difficult by that fact that, by default, Microsoft has not
provided a way to do an in place upgrade.
Normally this would mean that you would need to wipe your hard drive clean and start from
scratch but a program called PCMover from LapLink makes upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 as
easy as any other upgrade.
LapLink, which costs $19.95, acts like a moving van for all of your programs, files and
settings. It packs them all up and moves them to your newly installed version of Windows 7 so that
you are ready to go without the need to re-install every program. The ability to keep your programs
installed from Windows XP to Windows 7 is one of the things that sets LapLink’s PC Mover apart from
other settings and file transfer solutions. Unfortunately PC Mover can’t move every application,
like iTunes or other software that is picky about DRM, but it in our test it handled most programs
with ease.
To test out LapLink’s Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant I used an HP Mini 1000 netbook with 16 GB
hard drive and a standard Windows XP installation. On it I installed several programs such as AVG
antivirus, Skype, Trillian, Camstudio and iTunes. As for files I loaded it up with a mixture of
image, video, office and other file types from my DropBox account for roughly 2 GB of files.
The process was, for the most part, very simple. The most confusing part I ran into was when
I had to tell PCMover what computer I was working with. The software identifies clicking on the Old
computer as the second step when in fact you need to click on it first. Since the process is
explained in the instructions, and the quick guide, this wasn’t a big issue but worth noting.
Thanks to the small hard drive in my netbook it didn’t take long to complete the first step
of the process which includes choosing what to transfer to my Windows 7 installation. By default
LapLink will move everything, but you can exclude specific folders, programs and even users if you
don’t need them on the new computer. This is a good time to uncheck old programs that won’t work in
Windows 7 without upgrading to a new version.
If you want to see the process in action you can watch the video below. Your time to run
PCMover will depend on the size of your hard drive and your computer’s specs.
After running LapLink I installed Windows 7 like normal, though I chose the custom
installation which keeps your old Windows installation on the computer in a “Windows.old”
folder. From what I can tell that’s where the moving van parks while you install Windows 7.
The installation process took about 2 hours which seemed to take a little bit longer than previous
Windows 7 installations (This was my fifth) but that’s due to moving old files around and you still
come out ahead in the end because you don’t need to re-install a bunch of programs and copy your
data back.
Once my Windows 7 installation completed I simply installed PC Mover again and this time
chose the “New Computer” option. After a few simple prompts the moving van started to unpack all of
my programs, files and settings to Windows 7.
Again, thanks to my small netbook hard drive the unpacking process took only about 10 minutes
and after a restart I had access to all of my old files and programs. I even had the same lovely
rolling hill background that Windows XP shipped with.