Replacing your PC with the latest and greatest the IT industry has to offer can be a bittersweet experience.

On the one hand there’s all that extra performance and functionality to look forward to, with features such as dual-core processors and widescreen displays both commonplace and affordable.

On the other, however, there’s likely to be a whole new operating system to learn – plus the fact that you’ll want to migrate across all your existing applications, settings and data files. This is never as easy as it might sound.

For those knowledgeable and brave enough, it’s possible to do it all yourself, copying everything manually and re-installing from scratch where necessary.

However, even experts will need plenty of time and are likely to forget something, while for lesser mortals some kind of help will always be required.

Fortunately, help is available in the form of tools built into Windows to help locate and move items such as browser favourites, desktop shortcuts, wallpaper, email and Registry settings and so on, not to mention all those documents you’ve accumulated over the years.

There are also third-party packages available that can do all this and help migrate other applications too.
That said, it’s easy to go wrong, so in this expert guide we look at what Windows includes to help you with migration, how the built-in tools work and what else you might like to consider to help iron out your migration wrinkles.

Vista’s built-in tools
It’s crucial to start by emphasising that what we’re concerned with here is migrating from an existing PC to a completely different one. If all you’re doing is upgrading to a new version of Windows on the same PC then the upgrade process should automatically take account of all your existing settings and preserve as many as possible.

Unfortunately that won’t happen by magic when you move to a new PC with a ready-installed operating system. When looking for help the first port of call has to be Microsoft and the two tools it makes available to assist with Vista migrations.

The first is Windows Easy Transfer, which is, in essence, an enhanced version of the Files and Settings Transfer wizard that was introduced in XP. The second is called the User State Migration Tool, also referred to as USMT.

You should use Windows Easy Transfer if migrating the odd PC or two, whereas USMT is a set of tools for use by systems administrators charged with migrating large numbers of users to the new operating system.

USMT migrations can be scripted, while Easy Transfer needs to be manually driven and the USMT software isn’t included as part of Vista as standard, although the latest 3.0 release can be downloaded free from the Microsoft website.

In terms of what they can migrate, the tools are fairly similar. However, it’s the Easy Transfer software we’ll concentrate on here, as it’s included in all the Vista editions and, as the name implies, it is easy to use (see the workshop here). It also benefits from a wizard-driven graphical interface rather than a command line, as with USMT.