Well, last night I had a complete PC failure. All of a sudden I lost
connection to the Internet, my printer, and I started receiving warnings and
errors at every turn. Even though I regularly use an automated back-up for
critical files (see my review of the Buffalo
LinkStation), there were 10 years of files on this PC that I needed
immediate access to before the hard drives failed.
Luckily, I remembered I had a USB LapLink cable that would allow me to
connect the dying PC to my new laptop (see my review of the Dell
XPS 1730). All I need was a software tool to connect the two systems.
I visited LapLink's site and found a new product called PCMover. This
tool enables you to literally clone a PC over a USB cable or over a network
connection.
Now I wish I could tell you that this is really hard to use
and that I needed 10 pages to walk you through the process of moving the
contents from one PC to another, but as the picture clearly shows above, it is
easy as pie.
You use the special USB LapLink cable to connect the two PCs.
This is not a standard USB cable. It has a device in the middle which contains
all of the magic that allows the two PCs to communicate and transfer files.
Then you install PCmover on each of the two PCs. Launch the software and
follow the wizards on each machine to either fully clone the entire contents
of one PC to another, or to select individual files and applications to
transfer.
What's cool about this is that you can connect two PCs with
different versions of Windows. Now you have to be careful that you don't
transfer old Windows 95 system files to your new Windows Vista machine. You'll
just hose everything up that way.
And you need to be sure that the applications you are moving
from an older machine to a newer machine will be supported by the newer
operating system. Otherwise, you are just wasting time. So do a thorough
inventory and some analysis before you start the PCmover process.
This tool will be particularly useful in small networks when a
workstation needs to be upgraded and you don't want to spend a lot of time
copying data and apps from a PC down to a network server and then back to the
new machine. PCmover is much more direct.
If you want to setup a new PC with old apps and data in a few
hours time -- unattended while you sleep -- then PCmover is going to save you
tons of time. To learn more about PCmover, please go here.
