Text 23865, 60 rader
Skriven 2006-11-18 20:56:59 av Alan Zisman (1:123/789.0)
Ärende: PCMover
===============
A little while ago, I mentioned that I was going to be (as a trial)
updating one of my school systems (currently using Win2000) to XP Pro...
60% of the workstations in my lab have XP Pro license stickers on their
sides.

First I tried using my school district's XP Pro installation CD with the
existing installation-- it did not give me an option to 'update' the
existing installation; it would have let me multi-boot to Win2000, but
the installation complained about that.

Instead, I let it go ahead and format the drive and install clean.

Next, I downloaded a copy of LapLink's PCmover... it's US$49 for a
downloadable copy -- a bit more expensive for the boxed version, but
that includes a special USB data-share cable.

The process is to install and run PCmover on the new system, then
install it and run it on an old system-- when it starts up on each
system, it asks how you're planning to transfer files; options are
across a network, using Laplink's USB cable, or using a slow
parallel-port data cable (remember those?)

I picked network... the first time I tried it, the old system saw the
new one- but couldn't connect to it. Eventually I realized that the
problem was the Win XP Firewall-- which was giving me a message asking
if it should block the PCmover connection, but the message was hidden
behind the PCmover window.

Once I told the firewall to allow the connection, everything proceeded
smoothly-- the default transfers all recognizable saved data files,
applications, and Windows and application settings. In this case, that
was 6 GB of stuff to transfer (including a reported 70,000 settings!).
It took about 2 hours across the network.

After it was done the XP system restarted-- and pretty much had
everything that was on the Win2000 system. I was very pleased, since
otherwise it would have been about 2 days to install and configure the
system to match the others.

(Your mileage may vary-- there were no user documents on these systems
since everything is saved to the network, no email, etc.... but lots of
little-known education applications-- and all transferred properly as
far as I can tell).

The down-side of PCmover is that the license is activated for a given
pair of systems... I could use it again if I needed to restore the same
PC from the same PC, but I couldn't use it over and over again... since
it requires activation online before it will run. (There's a process
that's usable with systems not connected online). Laplink's
justification is that for most users, it's a one-time process...

Any way, I just wanted to report about something that worked as
advertised.

-- 
- email: alan (at) zisman (dot) ca
- website: http://www.zisman.ca

--- MT-NewsWatcher/3.5.1 (Intel Mac OS X)
 * Origin: Ad Hoc (1:123/789.0)