TRANSFER SOFTWARE

Well I have bought a Refurbed puter and I need to transfer ALL my PROGRAM files exect the OS from my old HDD to my NEW without having to dig up the CD's. I can either install my OLD drive to transfer or do it on a cable. Anybody have a idea??


PS The old puter is XP Home SP2 and the NEW is WINDOWS 7 HOME if this makes any difference.

THANKS FOR ANY HELP ON THIS

It's a PITA, but there are commercial products. I got in the habit of installing all my programs on a different drive and/or partition long ago, and keeping the boot drive just the OS.

I've never used a commercial product, I've just exported chunks of the registry, edited if needed, and import them into the new OS. But it's not for the faint of heart, the Windows Registry will give you Hives.

But... I'm pretty white 'n nerdy.

This is from Microsoft...
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...bott_fstw.mspx

Tutorial from Bleeping COmputer (decent resource, great name).
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tuto...138.html#intro

I have not used this in a long time, but it was a great commercial product in the past.
http://www.laplink.com/pcmover

??? What he said ?^?^?^?

I haven't tried it (prefer doing "clean" installs), but Win 7 has a program called "Windows Easy Transfer" that is supposed to do just that.

It's under Accessories | System Tools.