Date:         Fri, 24 Dec 2010 09:01:54 -0800
Reply-To:     Loren Busch <starwagen@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Loren Busch <starwagen@GMAIL.COM>
Subject:      NVC Follow up on Late Friday post Question on Migrating to New PC
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

I posted this to WetWesties a couple of days ago but it's Friday here
now....

About 10 days ago I asked if anyone had found a program that actually worked
and worked right for migrating from an old Windows XP computer to a new
computer running Windows 7.  This is a follow up on my experience in doing
just that. And mostly good news.

All that follows assumes first that you have some basic knowledge about
copying files and an external storage device that will handle some of your
files.

First, the easy stuff.  If you are using Firefox as you browser the move is
duck soup and works perfect.  Go to the Firefox support pages and follow
their instructions.  You just copy the contents of a specific directory from
the old computer and paste into a specific directory on the new computer.
This assumes you have downloaded and installed Firefox on the new computer.
All bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, etc.  come over perfect.

Second, you can move all your documents and pictures, etc by copying to an
external storage device and then copying to the new hard drive.  Microsoft
provides a program to do this (I didn't use it) by connecting the two
computers together.

Now the big problem, moving programs (and all the associated fires and
settings) from the old computer and getting them to run under Windows
7.  Re-installing
all the programs you might have on the old computer can be a real hassle and
time consuming even if you can find the CDs and have the product key or
license code handy.  The ideal situation would be to just 'migrate' to the
new system.  But, some programs that ran fine under XP won't even install
under Win 7 let alone run.  An Internet search will find several programs
out there that claim to work, migrating you old programs to the new
computer.  But if you find the reviews on those programs they have a lot of
problems.  And when they do work you still will find that some of your
programs won't run under Win 7.

But, I found one program that made sense.  It would create a 'capsule' for
ALL the contents of your XP hard drive and then run it a separate window.  If
it worked I could have the option of clicking on a desktop icon and have my
old desktop pop up on my screen and be able to run just like I did with the
old machine.  The program was Zinstall  (see zinstall.com ) The price was
steep, $89 but they boasted of total success or your money back.  So I bit,
paid for it, downloaded the program and ran it. (At this point I'm going to
NOT go into details about multiple failures and many hours of running and
re-running the migration using different configurations, that's a long story
and much of the problems can be attributed to problems with my old system,
not to Zinstall.)

AND IT WORKED!!!  That is, after a LOT of support from their tech staff and
a lot of patience on my end.  I now have an icon on the desktop of my new
computer that I can click on and Presto! I have my entire old XP desktop
running on my screen and I can run any program that I had on my old
computer.  And that include a bunch of old programs that I'd already tried
to load into Win 7 or run under Win 7 that won't run under Win 7.  Now if I
want them I can just switch to the old XP setup.  BTW, even though not
needed, all the document and picture files also came over into the XP
'capsule'.

So, bottom line is that it IS possible to go to a new computer running Win 7
and still run all your old XP programs.

A couple of footnotes here.  I went from a 200GB drive to a 2 TB drive so
there is plenty of room on the new hard drive.  Also, the migration can be
very slow, many hours.  This can be improved dramatically by purchasing an
external hard drive enclosure and removing the hard drive from the old
computer and putting it in that enclosure and plugging that into your new
computer for the migration.  Much faster than connecting the two computers.
And if you decide to use Zinstall read the 'manual' they have online at
their website and especially heed  the suggestion to run CHKDSK before you
attempt the migration.  It will probably save you a bunch of time.

If anyone wants more details pmail me and I'll be glad to go into specific
details.

And I don't own any stock in Zinstall, etc.  But they did provide many hours
of detailed tech support on this, I'm quite impressed.  They earned their
$89.