Vista to 7 on different laptops upgrade question

[calvins48]

Hello all.

I currently have Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit installed on my Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop and I'm buying a new Asus laptop that has Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit pre-installed on it. What's the safest and easiest way to transfer everything over?

Will there be compatability issues with the 32-bit and 64-bit versions? I know there won't be compatability issues with Vista and 7 because 7 is backwards compatible.

Thanks in advance!

[Mulreay]

Hi Calvins48 welcome to computerhope. 

How do you plan to do the transfer? External drive? Cross over cable?
And what kind of files are you moving over?
Would need to know your method/file types, then we can look at it..

[calvins48]

Yeah, I was thinking external hard drive but that may be a long process seeing as when I lost my hard drive on this Dell laptop I had to put everything back on it. From that experience, I know I'd have to re-install Microsoft Office, my anti-virus programmes and Flight Simulator X but my FSX airplanes would be ok I think.

It's just general files; pictures, videos, various documents really. The re-installing of everything would take time but 7's backwards-compatible so there's no problems there.

What would you recommend? An external hard drive would be quite a lenghty process; I know transfer cables can be bought but I heard they're not that great. Is this true?

Thanks again.

[jkolak]

If you don't want to burn CDs or DVDs, you need something simple to copy your files to like an external hard drive or a USB drive.

If you can connect both of them to a LAN, you can transfer files across the LAN via the Public or Shared folders.

[BC_Programmer]

An external Hard drive is not a lengthy process- you just copy your data to the external drive, disconnect it, attach it to the other PC, and copy it to the new one.

there is no such thing as a "transfer cable"- a crossover cable is just a CAT-5e cable. (CAT-5 cables had to be made different to be used as crossover cables, but Cat-5e and cat-6 cables work fine without being "special"). what you would do is simply plug each end of the cable into each laptop, and each PC will be able to share files via the standard networking capabilities.

Either go with an external drive or burn your files to CD/DVD, or use a Flash drive.