I just upgraded our two Dell C610 laptops at home
replacing our 30GB and 60GB disks
with some new 80GB and 120GB.. running XP.

BUT - I was thinking,
if we ever want to say get a new Dell
that happens to come with Vista,
how can I migrate all the old stuff
to the new system ??

I wish I could just swap drives
and then hopefully get any drivers for XP.
BUT - the new laptop probably has SATA
and the old drives are IDE.

There is a lot of programs on the existing systems,
along with their registry entries and other supporting entries.

Not sure how to even think about how to migrate
not just the files in the /programs/ but also how to grab
the registry entries that sometimes contain serial numbers
and other enabling keys....

--
----------------------------------
"If everything seems to be going well,
you have obviously overlooked something." - Steven Wright

ps56k wrote on Sun, 23 Nov 2008 20:10:42 -0600:
> I just upgraded our two Dell C610 laptops at home
> replacing our 30GB and 60GB disks
> with some new 80GB and 120GB.. running XP.
>
> BUT - I was thinking,
> if we ever want to say get a new Dell
> that happens to come with Vista,
> how can I migrate all the old stuff
> to the new system ??
>
> I wish I could just swap drives
> and then hopefully get any drivers for XP.
> BUT - the new laptop probably has SATA
> and the old drives are IDE.
>
> There is a lot of programs on the existing systems,
> along with their registry entries and other supporting entries.
>
> Not sure how to even think about how to migrate
> not just the files in the /programs/ but also how to grab
> the registry entries that sometimes contain serial numbers
> and other enabling keys....

Yes this is a big problem unless you want to install all of your
applications all over again. The data and settings are easy though, as
Microsoft gave you a program to do this.

The best answer I could give you is to start using VirtualPC. As you can
run virtually any OS on any newer machine and still have everything you
had before. Even if you are a Windows 3.1 user. :P Requires Windows XP
Pro AFAIK. Home version won't cut it. I am not sure which version of
Vista you need to do the same. VirtualPC is free from Microsoft btw. I
don't know if it can run under Windows 2000 or not. But that would be
interesting too. Windows 2000 only had one version, Pro and that is it.

--
Bill
Asus EEE PC 8GB 1GB SoDIMM Adata 16GB
Windows XP SP2 and Xandros Linux