Question Transferring older Windows 10 info to New PC with W11

ingeborgdot · Jun 22, 2024

I have a PC that is 7 years old. It is an important PC and we are upgrading to a new PC which you know will have W11. The older PC is still in good working condition so there is no problem there, but we like to upgrade our PC every 5 years but we got behind. It is one we use for our office and it has many important things on it. It has 3 different places that this PC is backed up to so there is no problem there.
I would like to ask a question about the fastest and easiest way to get all the info from the old PC to the new one. I have had such good luck with PC's in the past I have never really done this before, so I would like some advice.
The old PC with W10 has 2 drives. OS and storage. The new drive has 2 drives also, OS and storage.
What other info do you need to help me figure out my best route to transfer everything from one to the other.
Thanks.

mikeymikec · Jun 22, 2024

Are you asking a technical hardware / throughput type question or a "which software should I use to make the migration as easy as possible" question?

Tech Junky · Jun 22, 2024

Fastest migration is physically move the drives to the new PC.

Second fastest would be a thunderbolt cable between them...

Third fastest just sync them across your existing network. There's an app for .moving things to the new PC.

ingeborgdot · Jun 22, 2024

mikeymikec said:
Are you asking a technical hardware / throughput type question or a "which software should I use to make the migration as easy as possible" question?

I'm not sure what I'm asking. LOL. I'm just wanting to know what you would do if you were moving 700GB worth of info from one PC to another. Making sure desktop is the same etc. I know I will have to reinstall all the software (that sucks), but it is what it is.

mikeymikec · Jun 22, 2024

ingeborgdot said:
I'm not sure what I'm asking. LOL. I'm just wanting to know what you would do if you were moving 700GB worth of info from one PC to another. Making sure desktop is the same etc. I know I will have to reinstall all the software (that sucks), but it is what it is.

What's your hardware and software experience like, for example are you confident in opening a desktop PC and pulling out one or more drives, then connecting those up to the new computer? Have you transferred lots of data before, or is copying data something that makes you a bit nervous?

Do you have a USB drive enclosure, or a USB external hard drive with which to transfer data from computer A to computer B?

If you're comfortable with general data transfer, is there any 'special' software installed which you're not sure how to get the data across?

ingeborgdot · Jun 22, 2024

mikeymikec said:
What's your hardware and software experience like, for example are you confident in opening a desktop PC and pulling out one or more drives, then connecting those up to the new computer? Have you transferred lots of data before, or is copying data something that makes you a bit nervous?

Do you have a USB drive enclosure, or a USB external hard drive with which to transfer data from computer A to computer B?

If you're comfortable with general data transfer, is there any 'special' software installed which you're not sure how to get the data across?

I'm confident with it. I am mainly just wanting to know if there is an easier way of transferring data than just copying from a backup of going over the network and copying from PC to PC. Because I have not had to do this very often, I may be out of the loop for new techniques that people use is why I'm asking.
Copying D drive to D drive info will be easy. Its the C drive OS and installing all the programs again that gets me. TIME, which I don't like to waste.
So, if there is nothing special I can do, I'll just start copying D to D, and reinstalling all the programs and set them up all over again I guess.

How can I make sure that the desktop from the old goes to the new just like it was? They like the desktop the way it is.

mikeymikec · Jun 22, 2024

Going over the network is generally slow unless you've gone out of your way to make it unusually fast. Even gigabit ethernet isn't that exciting, though I suppose if you're going hard drive to hard drive then up to about 100MB/sec probably isn't far off the HDDs' full potential and no having to faff around with either opening up PCs or copy from computer A to portable drive then portable drive to computer B. However, unless you have that filesharing network set up already then there's the faffing around to get that working.

Me personally, I have an second-hand mSATA SSD in a mSATA USB enclosure which has done about 300MB/sec or more when going from SSD to SSD, minus the usual latency issues with waiting for HDDs to change from one tiny file to the next.

"They like the desktop the way it is" - if you were going from the same version of Windows on the old PC to the new one then you could *potentially* take the boot drive from the old PC to the new, connect it up and maybe it'll boot without crashing, but as you say you're going from 10 to 11 so that's not really an option by the sounds of things. One tactic I've successfully used once before is a program called 'Transwiz' that backs up a Windows user profile so it can be restored onto a new one; you would still need to install any required apps (preferably before transferring the profile), but the user profile coming across in one piece (if it worked) would certainly save you some time / configuration work.

ingeborgdot · Jun 22, 2024

I got it all done. It went better than expected. Everything so far is working fine.

mikeymikec · Jun 23, 2024

How did you end up doing it?

ingeborgdot · Jun 23, 2024

Well, for drive C, I just installed the programs that were on the other PC. I had to go and download them all, but that went pretty quickly.
Then I just used my backup from the old PC D drive from my NAS and restored it to the D drive. It had the desktop settings so all the icons and folders they like are exactly like the old desktop. All docs and downloads were perfect etc.
I knew what I could do to get this done, I just didn't think it would go as smoothly as it did. I've never had to do this before in all the years of doing this, so I didn't know how it would really go.

Question Transferring older Windows 10 info to New PC with W11

ingeborgdot

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mikeymikec

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Tech Junky

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ingeborgdot

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mikeymikec

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ingeborgdot

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mikeymikec

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ingeborgdot

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