Win 11: Old PC copy over to new PC?

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skypine27

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What's the best way to do this:

Say you have your old, trust worthy home built system with all your files pics music bookmarks passwords games etc running Win 11 Pro. Youre tired of building PCs at this point and you buy a fancy, new OEM PC with Win 11, and all the associated bloatware, preinstalled. And you have 2 x monitors.

Is there anyway to "copy" all the stuff, settings, files, bookmarks from the old PC over to the new one via wifi or network? The new one is going to have a new mobo, CPU, hardware etc so something like a Macrium Reflect Free disk image restore wouldnt work well.

What to do? Whats the easiest way to make your new PC look and feel like your old one?
 
Last edited:
skypine27 said:
What's the best way to do this:

Say you have your old, trust worthy home built system with all your files pics music bookmarks passwords games etc running Win 11 Pro. Youre tired of building PCs at this point and you buy a fancy, new OEM PC with Win 11, and all the associated bloatware, preinstalled. And you have 2 x monitors.

Is there anyway to "copy" all the stuff, settings, files, bookmarks from the old PC over to the new one via wifi or network? The new one is going to have a new mobo, CPU, hardware etc so something like a Macrium Reflect Free disk image restore wouldnt work well.

What to do? Whats the easiest way to make your new PC look and feel like your old one?
Click to expand...
Unfortunately the Windows registry makes this pretty much impossible. All you can do is a 'dirty' migration where you copy your OS from the other computer and hope Windows can sort itself out on the next reboot. On most other OSes you would just copy your applications/home folder and be done with it.
 
clone it, let windows setup the new hardware. if using both systems, change the system name and the windows key to the oem key. then remove the old drivers and install new ones for the correct hardware.
ive transplanted/clones the same ssd between 12+ different configs, desktop and laptop, without issues. 10/11 adapt to hardware changes very well.
 
skypine27 said:
What's the best way to do this:

Say you have your old, trust worthy home built system with all your files pics music bookmarks passwords games etc running Win 11 Pro. Youre tired of building PCs at this point and you buy a fancy, new OEM PC with Win 11, and all the associated bloatware, preinstalled. And you have 2 x monitors.

Is there anyway to "copy" all the stuff, settings, files, bookmarks from the old PC over to the new one via wifi or network? The new one is going to have a new mobo, CPU, hardware etc so something like a Macrium Reflect Free disk image restore wouldnt work well.

What to do? Whats the easiest way to make your new PC look and feel like your old one?
Click to expand...
Laplink. I used it and it migrated almost all software and settings. (I handle data in a separate drive partition.) I had to reinstall only Office and Norton Security software.
 
That's one reason I do my main, home machine as a vm, I airways change the physical machine (like every 2 months), just need to copy the vm from old to new
 
Even beyond using an imaging program, a good chunk of your files are located in your user directory. Bookmarks, pictures, movies, documents, etc. are housed in there. Most games that don't have cloud saves toss their files in there, too. Just copying your user folder to another PC will account for most of the files that people want to keep. You'll still have to install your programs and such, though.
 
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