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We have been doing this a fair bit recently 4-5 machines as we upgrade users because many of them are now required to have encrypted hard disks and that means going to Windows Ultimate. Several things irritate me.
Windows Ultimate is one grade above 7, but it's VERY hard to find an OEM upgrade from XP straight to Ultimate, you used to be able to get it online from Direct Deals but now they don't have it either(rarely at best). So you end up having to upgrade to Win7 and then immediately upgrade to Ultimate which is of course more expensive than just going directly to Ultimate.
Easy Transfer is MS product, and on their own website you can find language where they say at one point it transfers over all the settings including Outlook(but not programs) and in another place it says due to customer comments, they do NOT advise you use it for Outlook, do that manually.
The first few I did manually, the last 2 did themselves. by that I mean we did the Easy Transfer and did NOT select the Outlook files. But when I did the Easy Transfer on the new machine to install the files, I then went to setup Outlook and discovered the Outlook .PST file already there, even though I'd never opened Outlook. So I assume Easy Transfer put it there? Weirder yet, both times, I didn't have to create the account in Outlook, it was already there, again ET must have copied over those settings, even though we didn't select them to be transferred.
Then you get the opposite, the last user has Firefox as his favorite browser, so when I did ET, it copied over his favorites, I then downloaded FF to the new laptop and opened it, and it's not finding those files, his bookmarks are empty. I suppose I can import them somehow but I thought that was what ET was supposed to do? So with Outlook it imported files it wasn't supposed to and worked, and with FF it didn't work when it was supposed to.
If they solve those hiccups it's a pretty nice feature. The way we do it is we save the file from the old computer on the users network folder and then go to the new machine and download that file from that same folder, we don't use the Easy Transfer cable that apparently is quite buggy. It's quite fast although one user had enormous amounts of data and his stopped and started several times before finally finishing but it did work.
Windows Ultimate is one grade above 7, but it's VERY hard to find an OEM upgrade from XP straight to Ultimate, you used to be able to get it online from Direct Deals but now they don't have it either(rarely at best). So you end up having to upgrade to Win7 and then immediately upgrade to Ultimate which is of course more expensive than just going directly to Ultimate.
Easy Transfer is MS product, and on their own website you can find language where they say at one point it transfers over all the settings including Outlook(but not programs) and in another place it says due to customer comments, they do NOT advise you use it for Outlook, do that manually.
The first few I did manually, the last 2 did themselves. by that I mean we did the Easy Transfer and did NOT select the Outlook files. But when I did the Easy Transfer on the new machine to install the files, I then went to setup Outlook and discovered the Outlook .PST file already there, even though I'd never opened Outlook. So I assume Easy Transfer put it there? Weirder yet, both times, I didn't have to create the account in Outlook, it was already there, again ET must have copied over those settings, even though we didn't select them to be transferred.
Then you get the opposite, the last user has Firefox as his favorite browser, so when I did ET, it copied over his favorites, I then downloaded FF to the new laptop and opened it, and it's not finding those files, his bookmarks are empty. I suppose I can import them somehow but I thought that was what ET was supposed to do? So with Outlook it imported files it wasn't supposed to and worked, and with FF it didn't work when it was supposed to.
If they solve those hiccups it's a pretty nice feature. The way we do it is we save the file from the old computer on the users network folder and then go to the new machine and download that file from that same folder, we don't use the Easy Transfer cable that apparently is quite buggy. It's quite fast although one user had enormous amounts of data and his stopped and started several times before finally finishing but it did work.
