Migrating to a New PC: The Best and The Worst Applications

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Phew. I just spent the last few days migrating to a new PC. Actually, it’s a PC I’ve used before, but I have to return the nice Dell I borrowed from the 9 to 5 tomorrow so I’m switching back to a not-quite-as-nice Dell. It’s works fine…so far. The only things left are audio and video card installation. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that this baby can handle the video card because I’ll cry if I can’t use both my monitors. For real.


I have migrated PCs before, but never when I’ve had one that was so thoroughly customized. I didn’t want to lose anything so it took a long time to make sure I wasn’t leaving anything behind. Some applications are easy enough to reinstall, but it’s the applications with tons of settings and customizations that are the real beasts. I knew Firefox would be easy because I just had to export and import my bookmarks file. My biggest worries were Roboform and Outlook. So let me tell you how they did.

The Worst Application to Migrate: Outlook

Outlook was a pain in the ass to migrated. I have rules, multiple accounts and contacts I didn’t want to reenter. I figured just switching over the personal data file would do the trick, but it didn’t. I ended up having to do three different import operations to get everything transferred over. And I still had to do some duct-taping when it came to getting Outlook to choose the right contacts file – even though I’d told it to overwrite the default one.

I started with the Windows Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. It took forever to export and then just as long to import to the new PC. And guess what? I honestly have no idea what it did aside from totally effing up my quick launch toolbar. Seriously. I’m not sure what files and settings it transferred, but I have yet to see anything helpful.

My next step was to export all my email messages. This took forever because I made the huge mistake of not sorting through my mail before starting the export. I literally transferred about 2,000 junk mail messages to my new PC because of this oversight. Lesson learned there.

After the messages were in place, I realized that I still didn’t have my accounts set up. I read several help articles on Microsoft online (Help? LOL!) and tried to follow directions, but for some reason I couldn’t get the damn things to export. I remedied this in two steps. First, I manually entered the accounts I knew I needed right away. Second, I decided that some accounts should just be forwarded anyway. I have an admin account set up for each of my Adsense and BANS sites. I had it set up so each of those accounts went to its own folder in Outlook. The thing is, these accounts very rarely get any email so it’s kind of a waste to have them all spread out like that. So I created one account to forward all of those accounts to and got rid of a bunch of folders and confusion. In the long run, this will be much to my advantage, but it’s still annoying to have to do all of this.

After I created the accounts, I was able to successfully import all my rules. However, they weren’t working because they couldn’t find my contacts information. I was able to import my contacts at that point, but instead of replacing the default contact file, Outlook added a new one. Finally, after much rooting around through various Options and Tools, I was able to figure out how to remove the original contacts file and point to the correct one.

The upshot of this is that if you use Outlook with multiple accounts, you should be prepared for an uphill battle. I’m again considering switching to Gmail so I won’t have to deal with all of this migration bullsh!t again. Does anyone have a good method set up for using Gmail with multiple accounts? Or is there a good article I could read about it? Thanks!

The Best Application to Migrate: Roboform

I love Roboform. It is one of the few applications I have upgraded to the paid version because I lean on it so heavily. As a blogger I’m sure that, like me, you have a million and eighteen passwords. Roboform takes care of all this. On top of that, it fills forms for you. I couldn’t live without it and I was really afraid that I’d have to reenter all my information. I pictured myself sitting here with one computer sitting next to another, carefully pulling up information on one screen and then re-entering it on the other screen.

All that worrying was for nothing because migrating Roboform to the new PC literally took less than two and a half minutes. Here’s how it worked:

And that was it. My hundreds of passwords, personal information and settings were on the new PC in less time than it takes to make Top Ramen. It was unbelievable. After the Outlook debacle I was stunned by the ease of this process. I’m so attached to Roboform that I would still have used it if it had taken me a week to get it setup again, but having such an easy process for migration just made me fall in love with it even more. If you don’t have it: Download the Free Version of Roboform. It is incredibly software and very affordable.

Okay so that’s my take on the hardest and easiest applications to migrate. Who else has their favorites or least favorites? And horror stories? Is there any program that was so hard to migrate you just gave up on it? Share!