Successful upgrade of XP SP3 to Windows 7 RTM via LapLink PC Mover Pro

[Schutzhund]

What does RTM stand for? Read the Manual (without the normally obligatory F?)

Whatever it is, I secured a Windows 7 Ultimate X64 .iso from MSDN, and following the suggestions on this Forum, successfuly created a new VM. It's an enormous improvement over Vista, as many have noted, and seems to run flawlessly (if a bit slowly) under Fusion 2.0.5 (Mac Pro Quad 3.0 ghz, 10 GB RAM). I gave it 2 processors and 1028 KB RAM; I need to putz with these settings to see if I cannot tweak it a bit--suggestions?

I loaded it with the latest Office and the Adobe Creative Suite, and pounded it with Google Earth (NBDO NOT run GE under DirectXit will virtually freeze your machine; OpenGL is marginally acceptable), and everything ran fine.

Never one to leave well enough alone, I decided to find a way to upgrade my trusty XP SP3 VM with dual HD' which is loaded with my documents, images, emails, and a multitiude of apps that I have been accumulating and lugging around for years. It was one I had originallly built on a real PC, transferred into Parallels, converted to Fusion, then back to Parallels and then back to Fusion. It has a few miles on the clock. I know that MS says there is no way to do this. But I saw a press release from LapLink that their PCMover application would permit an XP to Windows 7 upgrade, so I gave it a shot.

First, I recommend that if you want to try this, you use the Pro rather than the Home version. It costs $20 more, but it's worth it. This is because you can selectively migrate applications and files, rather than moving everything by default. With Pro, I was able to eliminate duplicate or outdated applications, get rid of those pesky Parallels tools that I had inherited when I coverted my VM from that dreadful program, and generallly clean house. I discovered:

1) It's important to uninstall VMWare Tools before migrating. It seems that you should do this both on the "old" and "new" machines, as otherwise, the networking gets bollixed up.

2) The fastest and easiest way is to have plenty of disk space available, either on a spare drive (I have 2.5 TB on line), or an external device.

3) RTFM (it's quick and easy)

4) Prepare to allocate several hours to the process.

Basically, install and fire up PC Mover on the new VM, and use it to prepare a "snapshot" of this VM, which you store on a drive accessible to the old VM. Then suspend the new VM, fire up the old (in my case XP) VM, and start PCMover. It will first grab the snapshot, then create something that is charmingly (or stupidly) called a "Moving Van," which is a compressed file of your various applications and files, again in an accessible location with plenty of disk space. Once "filled," you suspend your old machine, fire up the new one, and continue where you left off in PCMover. It pulls everything down, and asks you to reboot your machine.

I did this, and by gum it worked like a champ. No errors, no glitches, no fiddling. But if you don't like the result, you can reverse the migration, and your new VM will return to its original state. Pretty cool.

So there, Microsoft!

One caveat: you can only do one migration per copy of PC Mover you purchase. That seems pretty mingy to me, but I understand why they do it. It's a small enough price to pay.

Message was edited by: Schutzhund for typos