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  • Another PC migration trick

    From John Rumm@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jul 31 17:06:09 2025
    I thought this might be handy for some...

    Had a interesting migration problem to sort yesterday. Some time ago, a customer had bought another company where the original owners were
    retiring, and with that purchase came some of their staff and computers.

    One chap came with a very slow and creaky Dell SFF desktop running Win
    10 home. Previously I had swapped out its HDD for a SSD to make less obnoxiously slow. That helped, but still left an irritation since being
    the Home edition it would not support being controlled by the standard
    remote desktop client - and this chap often works from home or sometimes overseas.

    Now with EOL for Win 10 approaching I needed get him onto Win 11. The
    problem was the PC came preloaded with various bits of software that we
    had no way of re-installing such as a bespoke CRM system. While it could
    no longer connect to original data source, it did have a local cache of
    data that was worth keeping.

    So I opted for the "move everything" approach described here:

    https://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php/Moving_my_files_to_a_new_PC#Everything

    That worked with surprisingly little difficulty, migrating from the old
    AMD based Dell to a new Intel i5 platform that was pre-loaded with Win
    11 Pro. It needed three sets of drivers (motherboard management engine
    ones) downloaded from the new PCs motherboard manufacturer's web site. I
    also took the liberty of uninstalling all the Dell bloatware! After that
    we had a perfect clone of the old PC (just way faster).

    The final piece of the puzzle was to upgrade it to Win 11, and then get
    it to switch itself to Win 11 Pro to take advantage of the licence that
    the new target PC came with.

    Here is that process:

    https://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php/Moving_my_files_to_a_new_PC#Sneaky_Windows_edition_upgrade

    End result, complete clone with all apps, data, and settings, upgraded
    to Win 11 Pro.

    --
    Cheers,

    John.

    /=================================================================\
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    | John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk | \=================================================================/

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  • From wasbit@21:1/5 to John Rumm on Fri Aug 1 09:38:03 2025
    On 31/07/2025 17:06, John Rumm wrote:
    I thought this might be handy for some...

    Had a interesting migration problem to sort yesterday. Some time ago, a customer had bought another company where the original owners were
    retiring, and with that purchase came some of their staff and computers.

    One chap came with a very slow and creaky Dell SFF desktop running Win
    10 home. Previously I had swapped out its HDD for a SSD to make less obnoxiously slow. That helped, but still left an irritation since being
    the Home edition it would not support being controlled by the standard
    remote desktop client - and this chap often works from home or sometimes overseas.

    Now with EOL for Win 10 approaching I needed get him onto Win 11. The
    problem was the PC came preloaded with various bits of software that we
    had no way of re-installing such as a bespoke CRM system. While it could
    no longer connect to original data source, it did have a local cache of
    data that was worth keeping.

    So I opted for the "move everything" approach described here:

    https://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php/Moving_my_files_to_a_new_PC#Everything

    That worked with surprisingly little difficulty, migrating from the old
    AMD based Dell to a new Intel i5 platform that was pre-loaded with Win
    11 Pro. It needed three sets of drivers (motherboard management engine
    ones) downloaded from the new PCs motherboard manufacturer's web site. I
    also took the liberty of uninstalling all the Dell bloatware! After that
    we had a perfect clone of the old PC (just way faster).

    The final piece of the puzzle was to upgrade it to Win 11, and then get
    it to switch itself to Win 11 Pro to take advantage of the licence that
    the new target PC came with.

    Here is that process:

    https://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk/index.php/Moving_my_files_to_a_new_PC#Sneaky_Windows_edition_upgrade


    End result, complete clone with all apps, data, and settings, upgraded
    to Win 11 Pro.


    Thank you. Nice to know.


    --
    Regards
    wasbit

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