Speed up your Windows 7 upgrade with PCMover

I rarely use my billso.com pages to rec­om­mend spe­cific soft­ware pack­ages, but today I’m mak­ing an excep­tion for LapLink’s PCMover Upgrade Assis­tant. At the cur­rent price of $20 or €16, it’s a steal. My upgrade process took 4 hours – and this was the eas­i­est Win­dows upgrade I’ve done in 20 years.

I found PCMover when I was upgrad­ing my wife’s Win­dows Vista lap­top to Win­dows 7. Microsoft’s Win­dows 7 installer will do an in-place upgrade that tries to migrate the cur­rent files and appli­ca­tions — but from what I had read, a clean install would be a bet­ter option.

How­ever, a clean install might force me to rein­stall the old appli­ca­tions and migrate the data myself. I didn’t want to rein­stall each app one at a time.

For users who are try­ing to upgrade their 32-bit Win­dows instal­la­tion to a 64-bit instal­la­tion, the clean install option is Microsoft’s only offi­cial upgrade path. Rein­stal­la­tion of the appli­ca­tions is more or less required.

PCMover sim­u­lates a clean install by ana­lyz­ing the drive’s files and cre­at­ing an archive called a mov­ing van. Appli­ca­tions that won’t migrate prop­erly are flagged, and the user can choose what apps and data will actu­ally be moved.

This process took less than an hour, and the archive was cre­ated on the cur­rent hard drive. Obvi­ously, this migra­tion soft­ware won’t work unless the tar­get par­ti­tion has a lot of free space avail­able. For­tu­nately, this was a 500GB drive.

At this point, it was time to do a clean install of Win­dows 7. I just fol­lowed the PDF instruc­tions that LapLink pro­vided. The instal­la­tion took about 30 minutes.

The longest part of the process was migrat­ing the old appli­ca­tions and data to the new Win­dows 7 install. That took about 90 min­utes. The pro­jected times kept chang­ing as PCMover unpacked the mov­ing van.

After PCMover was done, I had to rein­stall the computer’s antivirus pro­gram and a printer dri­ver. That took about 20 minutes.

As a final step, I started Win­dows Update and had it down­load and apply the lat­est Win­dows 7 patches. That was the last hour of work – and I’m hes­i­tant to call this work, as I did some read­ing dur­ing most of this 4-hour process. This migra­tion was just too easy.

Image cour­tesy of Taller Hikari on Flickr via a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

Tagged as: install, Microsoft, migration, software, Windows