Best way to transfer programs to new laptop?

Hello All:
I am wanting to transfer (migrate) most of my programs from an older desktop (XP Home) to a newer Dell Vostro 1500 (Vista). I bought PC Mover by Laplink but find it's transfer all or nothing...no selective transfers.
Is there some built in tricks in these OS's where I could be more selective.
I'm a little afraid of doing a total transfer and then deleting a bunch of files since one of the reasons for getting the laptop was to avoid all the crap that is bogging down my desktop memory and HD. Any ideas short of going out and buying a more sophisticated transfer program etc?

Thanks

 

Migration usually isn't a good choice for software (most software uses the registry and a lot of registry stuff is machine specific). Better to install the software anew. Once you've got it installed you can use the 'Files and Settings' transfer wizard to migrate your data and settings.

 

Programs can't be transfered from one computer to another and have them work. Trying to copy them over using data transfers only copies the files, not the install.

You will need to install your programs from the original install disks or software downloads on your new system, sorry.

Edit: 'olyteddy' be me to it

 

Great minds think alike...

 

If you need to transfer data as well, I'd say do a twisty network- ethernet cable, but only if both setups have a gigabit card in them. I transferred over 50 gigs of songs, movies, .iso programs and misc items in about an hour. Much easier than using USB drives or anything else.

 

Very good idea, probably the quickest way currently available, other than hooking the old drive up internally. If you decide to go this route, the "twisty" cable is called a crossover cable, they're pretty cheap, ~$3-$5 online.

 

I'd suggest installing them all freshly

Some programmes can be moved - e.g. CCleaner is mobile (works from a flashdrive), QIP does too.

The other advantage of installing everything from scratch is the ability to start from scratch, update programmes then set everything up etc.

 

This is one reason I like to use "mobile" versions of programs when possible, that run on there own but even in that case when moving to a new computer chances are there are new versions of the program so I download it fresh.

All the bigger more mainstream programs are going to need to be installed again, now once you have them installed you can backup an image of your setup so that you can restore to that at a future date without installing them all again.

There is a such thing as a image backup that is not hardware dependant, meaning say you have everything installed on one machine you can then copy the image to another computer and it will copy over the stuff needed for the programs but be smart enough to not copy say the drivers for hardware that does not exsist on that machine.

I think it was ShadowClone or ShadowCopy some program like that, that advertised this feature as its main selling point, but I think Acronis also has a similar feature. In any case I do not think I would trust a transfer like this, it may work just fine but you will have under laying problems that you will not know about until its a bigger mess to solve than it would have been to just do the clean install from the get go.

 

or regular ethernet cable. Any RJ45 cable will work. Nowadays.. network card can do auto-crossover thus elimating the need for crossover cable.