Ask HN: Utilities / Techniques for transferring installed applications | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Utilities / Techniques for transferring installed applications

1 pointTallGuyShort4 comments

A relative of mine just bought a new laptop to replace their previous one (that is now heavily damaged, but barely usable). They have Microsoft Office and Intuit Quickbooks (among other things) but have long since lost the installation media. They asked if I could help them transfer the software to the new computer. Despite all the system recoveries I've done, I've never actually transferred complete applications from one machine to another. I'm betting it's a lot more involved than copying directories, as there must be countless registry settings that can't be copied directly.

Are there any recommendations on how to go about doing this? I have a couple of weeks to get it done and I don't mind buying a fairly inexpensive tool if I can get it quickly. I read about Move Me, but I'm wandering if there's a better (or DIY) alternative.

A clone of the disk with ghost[1] or better yet a hardware solution[2] to the new disk is going to be the "best" way to do this. This assumes the old computer is widows xp + (hopefully with an up to date service pack) and there are no major compatibility issues with the new hardware. This could be a six+ hour procedure depending on how things go so if your time is worth anything to you it's going to be cheaper to come up with a new version of office and if you are trying to put the xp disk into one of those HP laptops or similar with a tone of proprietary (bad) drivers and crapware then you might have issues going from the old system to the new one.

In any case this is really a serverfault.com or supperuser.com question...

[1] http://goo.gl/9MaP

[2] http://goo.gl/lHwD

It boils down to luck a lot of the time. That said, I've had plenty of applications that copy just fine with just folders, as they recreate registry variables on the next load. If you grab the Program Files folder, the C:\Users\$USER\ folder, and create the same $USER on his new computer, I'd be willing to bet you're going to get most of it working with no problem.

Naturally, a complete disk duplication would be preferable, but "heavily damaged" covers a lot of ground. If it's not reliable enough to stay up long enough to make a reliable disk image...

By heavily damaged I mean the screen is almost completely destroyed. Sounds like it works enough to open up explorer and copy files to a disk or maybe run some software I'm familiar with, but the disk itself is not damaged.

Thank you for comment - sounds like a direct copy is at least worth a try. Thank you!

I am really doubtful this is going to work with intuit software or MS office but best of luck...

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