It's been a few years since I've gotten a new laptop. Realized it was about time as the screen on my old Toshiba began flickering white lines and generally acting up.
I got a new Sony Vaio S-series. This model is one of the few Windows 7 PCs that have a full HD resolution screen, 1920x1080. (I am envious of the MacBook Pro Retina displays). I looked at Windows 8 PCs as well, but couldn't stomach the "start" display, I wasn't interested in touch screen features.
Step 1: Transfer Files
I decided to try using Windows Easy Transfer, which advertises that it can transfer, "User Accounts, Documents, Music, Pictures...And More". My old laptop and the new laptop are both Windows 7 and come with Windows Easy Transfer pre-installed.
It's fairly straightforward, you start it on the source PC, and you get a pass key, start in on the new PC and you enter the pass key, once you do that you can choose what folders basically from the old computer you want to transfer. In my case I did a wireless connection. When you select a user account to migrate it pre-selects all their Documents, Pictures and Music libraries (under C:\users\.. ), for Shared files it selects Public libraries and also what appears to be any folder on C:\ that is not part of the default Windows install. This means a lot of garbage may be brought along from the old PC, it's not always clear on where programs store their files. Unselected the options for Program Data and Windows settings, I was unsure what files this would actually bring. In total I had 60+ GB of data to transfer.
After you select the folders and start the transfer the program on both PCs tells you not to use anything. I assume this is to prevent you from moving or changing files on either side during the move.
The transfer ran a full day before the new PC crashed giving me a helpful "Operating System Not Found" prompt. I had to restart that PC and there doesn't seem to be anyway to recover the state of the transfer. Worse, there isn't a report of the files moved, so I didn't really know what had completed. I could see most of the files on the new PC, and new it was almost done, so I didn't have to re-run the whole thing again. I just resumed from shared folders that I saw were missing.
One confusing thing was that it didn't actually transfer the Windows user accounts I had selected. It copied all the files from the old user accounts into my current user on the new PC (which happened to be a different user that I didn't want to keep). So you still have to manually set up any new users in the Control Panel.
Step 2: Install software
Basically I knew what I needed for my projects, Windows Easy Transfer also provided a report of all the software from the old PC that I didn't have. It's helpful as a reference.
Step 3: Fixes:
So far other than missing license keys and other things I had to dig through my email or memory to get back, one major issue was with Windows Live Photo Gallery. The the database that WLPG stores ratings and metadata (person, descriptive and geotags) for image formats that don't support it is not moved during the transfer.
Other people have had the same issue:
How to transfer image tags from Vista Photo Gallery to Windows 7 Live Photo Gallery
The ultimate answer involves some scary manipulation of the hard disk volume id, but ok:
Migrating Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery database
Some helpful details about where WLPG stores files and it's database.
http://johnfederico.net/2009/07/27/windows-live-photo-gallery/
As I mentioned in my own experience of upgrading to Windows 7, I also transferred the old Windows Vista desktop backgrounds and user icons.
