Upgrading to Windows 7 can be a surprisingly complicated business. If you’re planning to upgrade an XP system, move up an edition (from Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional, say), or migrate from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7, for instance, then the standard Windows 7 installation won’t allow it. You’ll have to carry out a clean installation, then spend forever reconfiguring Windows, and reinstalling all your applications and data.

That’s not exactly an appealing prospect, but don’t worry – O&O Migration Kit for Windows 7 offers a simpler alternative. The suite can help you migrate any PC running Windows 2000 Professional, XP or Vista to any edition of Windows 7. And it’ll transfer your settings, most programs and all your data, potentially saving you an enormous amount of time and hassle.

The program comes with two components that will make this happen.

The first is O&O DiskImage 4 Professional Edition, a powerful backup tool. In just a few clicks this will set about making a backup image of your current Windows installation. Or, if you have a spare hard drive, then you can use the Clone Drive to make an exact copy of your setup. It’s quick, easy to use, and will give you very welcome insurance just in case something goes wrong during the update process. (And of course you can continue to use it after the update is complete.)

Once your system is safely backed up then you can turn to the second component, Laplink’s PCmover Professional. Install this on your old PC before the upgrade, and the program will transfer your settings, applications and data. It’s a reasonably straightforward process.

Preparing to upgrade

Laplink recommend following several steps before running PCmover, just to help ensure that your migration is a success. You should run ScanDisk to check for disk errors, for instance; scan your system for viruses; turn off all screen savers and power savers; and close all running applications (including security tools running in the system tray).

Once that’s done then you’re able to tell PCmover exactly what you’d like to migrate: your data only, data and settings, or data, settings and applications.

The program won’t be able to transfer everything on your system. Hardware drivers won’t be moved, for instance. Some copy-protected software may require reinstallation. And Laplink also recommend that antivirus programs, desktop search utilities and other “system tools” should also be reinstalled manually.

There are options to customise how PCmover works, but these aren’t very well explained. By default it won’t move your Word settings, for instance – but why not? What might happen if you do? The Help file doesn’t tell you, so we left the default PCmover settings alone.

These issues seemed relatively minor when we saw how many programs could be migrated on our test system, though: just about all of them, from big apps like Microsoft Office, our browsers and their settings, Corel PaintShop Photo Pro and VMware Workstation, to tiny little utilities that we’d installed the day before.

Once we’d chosen everything we wanted to be migrated, PCmover stored all this information in a “moving journal”. Then, after running a custom Windows 7 installation, we reinstalled PCmover, pointed it at the journal, and it reinstalled everything. This took more than an hour, but didn’t require any intervention so we simply left PCmover to get on with its unpacking.

Great results

The migration results were, generally, very impressive.

We had very few problems, and all relatively small. A couple of Microsoft Office extensions had to be reinstalled, for instance, and following PCmover’s advice, we chose to reinstall our security suite from scratch.

By way of compensation, though, all but one of our main applications were transferred successfully and worked perfectly (SmartDraw 2009 needed to be reinstalled). Most of their add-ons also worked right away. Application data was migrated successfully, so for example our browsers retained their favourites and history, while SmartFTP kept its account data. And our application and system settings were largely preserved, too.

On balance, then, the O&O Migration Kit saved us a huge amount of time and hassle. And, perhaps most importantly, it did this with the minimum of risk. Even if PCmover had somehow messed up our system, broken an important application or lost some data, we still had our DiskImage backup image. That could be reinstalled in its entirety, or mounted to extract just the particular files and folders we needed: our data was always safe.