Windows Easy Transfer

~ the obituary ~

Microsoft had been trying to solve one sentence since Windows 2000. I bought a new computer and I want the old one to be inside it. The first attempt was the User State Migration Tool, which had no interface at all and expected you to know what a command line was. Windows XP got the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard, which could be launched off the install CD and could write your old life onto a Zip disk. Windows Vista shipped Windows Easy Transfer on 30 January 2007 and it was the best-looking version of the same idea.

Microsoft took it seriously enough to buy a company for it. Jim Allchin demonstrated a preliminary build at WinHEC in 2004, and in March 2006 Microsoft acquired Apptimum specifically for its transfer technology. The finished wizard would move your data over a special USB bridge cable that shops sold as an Easy Transfer Cable, over a network, onto an external drive, or onto a stack of blank DVDs if that was what you had.

It never moved your programs. That limitation is on every support page, stated plainly, and it is the whole reason the wizard failed to become a habit. There was supposed to be an answer: Windows Easy Transfer Companion, which would carry supported applications across from XP to Vista. It sat in beta forever, Ed Bott wrote a piece in July 2008 asking whether Microsoft had quietly pulled the plug, and no final version ever shipped.

If you fixed computers for a living you did none of this. You pulled the old drive, copied the folders that mattered, reinstalled the programs from scratch, and were finished before the wizard had finished counting files. The wizard was for the other ninety percent, the ones who would otherwise stand in a shop asking whether the new machine could have their photos in it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it moved ~

Files and folders, user accounts and the settings attached to them. Whatever application configuration happened to live in a loose file or a registry key it recognized went across too, and it refused outright to migrate from a 64-bit system to a 32-bit one. On Vista and later it would not accept an incoming connection over a serial or infrared port, which is a sentence that dates the product precisely.

Then it got worse on purpose. In Windows 8.1 the wizard could import but no longer export, and it would only read data from Windows 7 onward, not from Vista and not from another 8.1 machine. The cable stopped working and the network option went away, leaving a USB flash drive as the only route in. Microsoft's own advice had already shifted to putting your files in OneDrive and letting the problem solve itself.

~ the funny part ~

Windows 10 launched on 29 July 2015 with the wizard simply absent, and Microsoft did not replace it. What it did instead was point at somebody else. From 1 September 2015 to 31 August 2016 the company gave away PCmover Express, a Laplink product, capped at 500 megabytes of data. For one year, the official Microsoft answer to moving into Windows was a third-party download with a size limit on it.

The idea came back in September 2023, folded into Windows Backup and wired into the setup screens on a fresh install, eight years after the wizard went away. It works better now, mostly because it assumes your files were never on the old machine in the first place. The problem Microsoft spent two decades failing to solve got solved by everyone agreeing to keep their documents somewhere else.

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