Copying discs 1-1

Exemplar

Hi All,

Friend has bought a new laptop.

They have asked me to copy the contents from their old laptop 1-1.

Are there any completely free solutions for this?

I do have a NAS as a temporary storage solution if needed..

TIA

googler

Connect both to either your/their network router, whether by wifi or ethernet, and set up shared folders on each.

Copy/paste from one to the other. Do this for data only. I assume the new one has an Operating System installed already?

Exemplar

googler wrote: »

Connect both to either your/their network router, whether by wifi or ethernet, and set up shared folders on each.

Copy/paste from one to the other. Do this for data only. I assume the new one has an Operating System installed already?

Yup. They both have 10. Sure that the network solution will copy 1-1?

Carrot007

Exemplar wrote: »

Yup. They both have 10. Sure that the network solution will copy 1-1?

No it won't but you don't want to do that as you will end up with an operating system with all the wrong drivers that will most likely not pass validation.

A new laptop is a good time to get rid of junk by just copying your data accross and then only installing applications when you need them.

googler

Exemplar wrote: »

Sure that the network solution will copy 1-1?

I'll say it again.

Do this for data only.

If you want clarification on this, see the post above, #4, and if it's still not clear, ask.

Heedtheadvice

I did it just as described for data files on xp to new win 10 PC.
Only issue was setting up rights to access files under user specific locations.....But all done in the end when access rights modified correctly. Certainly a better solution than pulling out drives on a laptop.

austonic

DVDs are likely smaller than the capacity of the hard disk on the old laptop, so you probably do not want to try copying the files to a disc.

Also, copying a complete installation, as others suggested, is really only useful for backup (for system recovery) but not so much for transfer to another computer. You need to focus just on data (and note the settings/configurations and any license information for applications used) - you might need to export data from some applications to be able to load it on another computer (e.g. Outlook/Outlook Express), or at the very least be sure where the data files are stored.

If you can get the computers onto the same network, you will be able to transfer data more easily. However, there is merit in investing in a suitable external hard disk drive to be used as both a data backup and transfer device.

One thing you might want to consider, is generating a virtual machine image of the original computer which can be run "in a window" on the new computer - the software for this is free but technical (usually advisable to take the original machine back to basic/generic driver configurations rather than using hardware specific drives before doing the capture). This is useful if there is any "old" software running on the original computer that the owner really wants to continue to use but for which discs have been lost and/or which does not work on the latest version of the target operating system.

austonic

OOPS - just realised you finished the job before I posted any suggestions.