Is there no "Windows Easy Transfer" from XP to Windows 8? Or is "Windows Easy Transfer" dangerously buggy?
My wife is transitioning from XP, SP3. on an older machine. to Windows 8 preinstalled on a new machine. Despite much Googling, I was unable to find any clear directions from Microsoft as to whether there's a suitable version of Windows Easy Transfer and what the procedure is supposed to be.
Microsoft provides a utility named "Windows Easy Transfer for transferring from Windows XP (32 bit) to Windows 7," but I could not find any utility "for transferring from Windows XP (32 bit) to Windows 8," nor could I find any indication of whether the "Windows 7" utility is supposed to work for migrating to Windows 8.
Did I miss something? If so, can you point me to the correct utility and directions for using it?
We downloaded the utility, ran it on her old machine, using an external hard drive for the transfer, and everything went smoothly and there were no error messages.
A version of Windows Easy Transfer was preinstalled on her Windows 8 machine. We moved the USB drive to the new machine, it recognized the transfer file, and everything seemingly went smoothly. Again, there were no error messages--until the very end.
At the very end of the process, it said that some protected files had been transferred, and that she needed to enter her password. All attempts to enter the password failed. She tried the password for her new machine, the password for her old machine, and we went back to the old machine and verified that she knew the password and that it worked. Eventually she hit "cancel" and the process seemed to complete.
However, there seemed to be all sorts of strange corruption in the system. Her directory contained many folder shortcuts with names like "my documents," but they said "access denied" if you tried to open them. I tried right-clicking on them to see their properties and take ownership, and discovered to my alarm that it was no longer possible to right-click on ANY file or folder--all attempts produced an endless spinning ring.
Googling suggested that this is sometimes the result of a program installing a custom context menu, but at no point did Windows Easy Transfer say it was installing any program--all it did was present a (very long) list of applications which it had not attempted to transfer or install.
In the end, we were so alarmed by what looked like permissions or context menu or registry corruption issues that we gave up and did a full restore to the "as-shipped" state.
Thoughts?
My wife is transitioning from XP, SP3. on an older machine. to Windows 8 preinstalled on a new machine. Despite much Googling, I was unable to find any clear directions from Microsoft as to whether there's a suitable version of Windows Easy Transfer and what the procedure is supposed to be.
Microsoft provides a utility named "Windows Easy Transfer for transferring from Windows XP (32 bit) to Windows 7," but I could not find any utility "for transferring from Windows XP (32 bit) to Windows 8," nor could I find any indication of whether the "Windows 7" utility is supposed to work for migrating to Windows 8.
Did I miss something? If so, can you point me to the correct utility and directions for using it?
We downloaded the utility, ran it on her old machine, using an external hard drive for the transfer, and everything went smoothly and there were no error messages.
A version of Windows Easy Transfer was preinstalled on her Windows 8 machine. We moved the USB drive to the new machine, it recognized the transfer file, and everything seemingly went smoothly. Again, there were no error messages--until the very end.
At the very end of the process, it said that some protected files had been transferred, and that she needed to enter her password. All attempts to enter the password failed. She tried the password for her new machine, the password for her old machine, and we went back to the old machine and verified that she knew the password and that it worked. Eventually she hit "cancel" and the process seemed to complete.
However, there seemed to be all sorts of strange corruption in the system. Her directory contained many folder shortcuts with names like "my documents," but they said "access denied" if you tried to open them. I tried right-clicking on them to see their properties and take ownership, and discovered to my alarm that it was no longer possible to right-click on ANY file or folder--all attempts produced an endless spinning ring.
Googling suggested that this is sometimes the result of a program installing a custom context menu, but at no point did Windows Easy Transfer say it was installing any program--all it did was present a (very long) list of applications which it had not attempted to transfer or install.
In the end, we were so alarmed by what looked like permissions or context menu or registry corruption issues that we gave up and did a full restore to the "as-shipped" state.
Thoughts?
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Windows 8
