How To: Transfer Your Data from XP to Vista

[Jeremy Charette]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://reviews.digitaltrends.com/guide79.html' target='_blank'>http://reviews.digitaltrends.com/guide79.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Like many PC users, you’ve probably been looking at Windows Vista since its January release and wondering whether you want to take the jump and buy it. Assuming your computer can handle its demands, and your wallet or plastic can stretch to the price, it’s tempting. But there’s one vital question – can you easily migrate your data to Vista without spending days tearing out your hair? The answer, happily, is yes."</i><br /><br /> <img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/vistamigration.jpg" /> <br /><br />If you're on the fence about Vista, my advice is: switch. The interface is more polished, and it's noticeably better at memory and CPU utilization. On the same machine, I've found Vista to feel faster, both in terms of system response and program startup. You'll find a few glithces with legacy programs here and there, but nothing that should sway you from jumping to Vista. As is pointed out in this Digital Trends article, it's incredibly easy to make the switch.

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

So, who am I suppose to believe? :confused totally:

[Jeff_R]

Although it's beyond the scope of this posting, that "Cost Analysis of Vista" article has been argued back and forth extensively, with some people backing it and some feeling it's half-truths and worse. There are some misunderstandings about it, but I think what's true is that most people are focused on the playing of Hi-Def content. The problem with HDCP-only pipelines, to my understanding, only comes into play when the Image Constraint Token is used on the disc itself, and the studios have agreed to postpone the ICT until 2010 or 2012. That's not a public press release, nor am I basing it on insider industry information. It's what's been leaked by the companies themselves, so they may or may not stick to it, but the current (uncertain) view is that it's not a problem.

Also, it is not Microsoft that did this; the studios did, so blame them, not Microsoft. Microsoft had a choice to either include HDCP support, and allow users to view Hi-Def content using the ICT when they had the right hardware, or not include HDCP, and deny users Hi-Def content completely. There was no other option.

The bigger problem is that Vista is heavily hardware dependent. My brother and I both switched, and both of us, using completely different systems (his Intel-based, mine AMD), experienced horrible performance: file copying taking 4-6 times longer than it should, graphics lock ups (both of us use Nvidia cards, which may have been part of the problem), and occasional blue screens (which weren't supposed to be possible.) My new 8800GTX performed worse under Vista than my old 7800GTX under XP.

I love Vista; I'm looking forward to going back to it, but I'm going to give it a few months to mature driver-wise. Your experience could be as rosy as the original poster's, or it could be worse than mine. All you'll find on the net is anectdotal evidence supporting both positions. My recommendation: Make an image of your XP installation before taking the plunge so you can return easily if you find yourself in my shoes. Or wait a while for drivers.

[Jeremy Charette]

Just for record, here's my current system (which was given to me by my friend's father):

Dell Dimension 4700
Intel P4 2.8 Ghz
160 GB SATA hard drive
2 GB DDR2-800 sdram
256 MB Radeon x1900gt video card

On the Vista Experience Index, it rates a 4.1, due to the processor, which I'll be upgrading soon. Everything else rates a 5.2 or better.

The only drivers I've had trouble with are the printer (HP Photosmart 7350), other than that everything has installed and updated perfectly. A change to the latest x1900gt driver caused images on-screen to flicker, but I rolled back to the previous version and saw no problems whatsoever.

Like Jeff said, your mileage may vary.

[Jason Dunn]

So, who am I suppose to believe? :confused totally:

The title of it really says it all:

"A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection"

The while article is about HD content protection and DRM - yet somehow people have read it as a breakdown of Vista as a whole. That article is really focused on one thing: that Vista is a DRM-secured for HD content and you need to have the right chain of hardware to watch HD content. Ask yourself this question: how much HD-DVD and Blu-ray content do I want to watch on my PC? I have a strong feeling most people could care less. The article was blown way out of proportion and made into something it was never meant to be.

But the thing is, the article is already out of date. I just ripped my first HD-DVD disc last week using AnyDVD and they released a version that works with Blu-ray. DRM doesn't work - people will always find a way around it.

Moving to Vista really depends on what kind of hardware and software you use - I certainly recommended that people wait a few more months for drivers to come out, because depending on what kind of hardware they have, they might not be able to use the stuff they own (curse you HP!).

[jeffd]

My thoughts so far on getting into vista. I'm on a dell inspiron 1505 laptop with a 1.6g dual core intel upgraded to 1 gig of ram and ati x1300 video. I find vista to definetly be smoother overall, and rarly is it slugish for casual computing or movie playback. I notice things like lots of HD thrashing after closing firefox after several hours of usage, but it dosn't slow windows down any. About the only game i've been playing on it is guild wars (I can half ass it with keyboard controls in that game, WoW on the other hand punishes careless deaths with cash penalties, and requires more time to do things in it so its not a good laptop game) and its been problem free. That said, i dont trust vista for games, xp will definetly perform them better.

That said, I want to center on that, vista is smoother, more friendlier, but XP is still the performance king by far. If I was a gamer, or required heavy photoshoping or 3d rendering, I wouldn't look at vista yet...

..and best of all, if you do video encoding, dont walk, RUN from vista! I wanted to re-encode some of my newest anime episodes to play on my zen vision M (Since I got my laptop, I've been downloading the HD h264 versions so they dont work on the zvm) and was dissapointed to find none of my encoders or codecs worked. FFDshow thankfully registers itself as a direct show decoder, so I can PLAY all my movies, but I had no luck in getting XVID to install as a codec.

Also wonderfull news on the virtualdub frontpage, apparently vista has a nasty little bug of writing BADDLY formed avi files (Pretty much every program in vista is effected since they use the same library. The latest unreleased vdub has a work around). So if your writing avi files, stick with xp.

[ctmagnus]

Back to the original topic (I believe this is a first for me!):

I went the Vista Transfer Cable route. It came with a copy of Laplink PCsync which needs to be installed on both machines, as well as the Windows Easy Transfer software. I only recommend using the Easy Transfer software if you have not touched the Vista machine yet. I had been using my Vista machine for a while before I wanted to move everything over, and had therefore started tweaking and customizing it. The Easy Transfer software has options to transfer every setting over, if you want. What I ended up doing was transferring over just my music library as that would have taken forever over an 802.11a network. For everything else, I used the Laplink software and just dragged and dropped everything over.

One thing to note: When using the Windows Easy Transfer software, the data is queued up to transfer on the original machine then actually transferred, essentially doubling the transfer time. I don't think this is the case with Laplink PCsync.

[pradike]

For what its worth:

I work in the Financial Services industry with one business unit of a Fortune 500 company. I regularly solicit IT departments at financial institutions on their desktop plans, and also get and read 5 different technology trade publications covering this large industry.

At this time, there is almost unanimous concensus that Vista is not going to be deployed as a viable and stable product in the Financial Services industry (banks, credit unions, insurance companies) until at least late 2008 or early 2009 - the primary reason being instability, unproven compatibility to existing applications, and inmmature toolkits for the product.

Having played with it personally for several months, I share the industry sentiment that there's no viable reason to hurry and get Vista. The mainstream adoption rate in the financial business community probably won't come until SP2 comes out for it.

[Jason Kravitz]

I have not had a very happy Vista experience. I upgraded my Dell I9300 to Vista in January and it is seriously dogging. Plus random programs will lock up the OS for seconds to minutes. Not to mention the classic "Allow/Deny" security which can be turned off but what's the point?

It is not a low end system (although I guess maybe by Vista standards)
Pentium M Processor 760 (2GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB)
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz
256MB NVIDA GeForce™ Go 6800

I installed as an upgrade to XP Pro. I'm wondering if a fresh install would clear up some of the problems with the lockups. Regardless, the Aero performance was so wretched I had to turn it off and that was one of my main reasons for using Vista (I like eye candy).

I've been toying with going back to MacOS for a while now. I was going to give Vista a try and see if M$ could get it right but now I think I'm going to sell the 9300 and get a MacBook Pro.

Besides playing games I don't have much of a need for Windows these days.