At work, I was furnished with a loan laptop while my new PC is on order. It was running Windows XP, and although I should only have to put up with this for a few years (at our IT support's glacial pace) I figured I would have a better time of it if I upgraded myself to Windows 7. I was wary of having to reinstall all my old software again, though, so I used Laplink's PCmover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant to help me along. I am writing to warn you against doing the same.
Though the program appeared to run properly on the Windows XP side of things, packing up a file it called a "moving van", after the installation of Windows 7, everything went to hell. I started getting errors on startup from programs that I could no longer uninstall or disable. All of my software failed to run and had to be reinstalled. Some of it produced errors when I tried to run the uninstallers, leaving my machine in a very unusable state. Ironically, I would have been in a better position if I had not taken any special steps to preserve my files, settings and programs, since then I would only have had to install new copies rather than wrestling with Windows to let go of the old, corrupted ones. And to pour salt onto these wounds, all of my hardware drivers, including the vital network port, had failed to transfer, too.
Of course your experience may vary, and they have cherry-picked some positive reviews to post on their website about the product. They also have some warnings about incompatible software and some that may need to be unregistered before upgrading Windows, then re-registered later, but when "some programs" means "every program" and "unregistered" seems to mean "uninstall", what benefit do you get from such a process?
In short, Laplink's PCmover made my transition from Windows XP to Windows 7 actively worse, and I recommend fleeing in the opposite direction.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - I really wanted this to work.
PPS - But it seems the dream of a smooth upgrade from XP to Windows 7 is still just a dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment