How to Transfer Everything From an Old PC to a New One

New PC on the desk, old PC still working, and the question is how to end up with everything on the new one without three weeks of discovering gaps.

The honest version of the answer, which transfer tools tend not to lead with: your files, settings, browser data and accounts all move across easily. Your installed programs do not. Not with a cable, not with a tool, not by copying folders. They have to be reinstalled, and the work of a PC migration is mostly that, not the copying.

Plan around that and the process is straightforward. Assume a tool will handle it and you will be hunting for a licence key you bought in 2019 at the worst possible moment.

What moves and what does not

The two rows in bold are the whole problem.

Before you touch the new PC

Work on the old machine first, whilst it still boots and you can still read things off it.

Collect your licence keys

This is the step that causes genuine pain when skipped. Go through every program you paid for and find its key or account details. Common places:

• The email account you bought it with. Search for the product name.
• The vendor’s website, under your account’s purchases or downloads.
• A key viewer utility, for keys embedded in the installed software.

Your Windows licence is normally tied to the hardware and to your Microsoft account, so it does not transfer and does not need to — the new PC comes with its own.

Office is account-based for Microsoft 365 subscriptions and sign-in handles it. A one-off perpetual licence usually allows a limited number of installations and may need deactivating on the old machine first.

Write down what is actually installed

Open Settings → Apps → Installed apps and go through the list. Screenshot it or copy it to a text file. Half of it will be things you no longer need, which is useful information in itself — a new PC is the best opportunity you will get to not reinstall the software you have been ignoring for two years.

Find the files that are not in your user folders

Documents, Pictures and Desktop are easy. The ones people lose:

• Game saves, often in %AppData%, %LocalAppData% or Documents\My Games.
• Outlook data files, usually under %UserProfile%\Documents\Outlook Files or %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Outlook.
• Browser profiles if you do not use sync.
• Anything on a second drive or partition, which is easy to forget when the new machine has one drive.
• Templates and custom dictionaries for Office, under %AppData%\Microsoft.
• Downloads. People assume it is a junk folder, then discover the installer for something no longer sold.

Type %AppData% into File Explorer’s address bar to go straight there.

Picking a transfer method

The external drive route is the one to default to, because the intermediate copy is a backup. If something goes wrong on the new machine you still have the files, which is not true of a direct transfer.

For a network copy, both machines on wired ethernet will move data several times faster than Wi-Fi. Share a folder on the old PC, access it by name from the new one, and leave it running.

For an old PC that will not start at all, a USB drive enclosure or docking station for its internal drive is usually under twenty pounds and reads the files directly.

The order that works

1. Sign into the new PC with your Microsoft account. Settings, themes, language preferences and your OneDrive contents follow automatically. Give OneDrive time to sync before assuming files are missing.

2. Sign into your browser and let it sync. Chrome, Edge and Firefox all restore bookmarks, saved passwords, history, open tabs and extensions from the account. This is the single highest-return step and takes two minutes. If you have never signed in, enable sync on the old PC first and wait for it to upload.

3. Copy your personal files. Documents, Pictures, Videos, Music, Desktop and Downloads. Copy, do not move, so the originals stay put. Verify the folder sizes match afterwards rather than trusting that it finished.

4. Reinstall your programs. Work down the list you made. Download fresh installers from the vendors rather than reusing old ones — versions have moved on, and old installers are a common source of bundled junk.

5. Reattach Outlook data files if you use desktop Outlook with local mail. Copy the .pst across, then in Outlook use File → Open & Export → Open Outlook Data File.

6. Set up printers and devices. Do not copy drivers across. Let Windows find them, or download current versions from the manufacturer. Drivers are tied to specific hardware and Windows versions.

7. Check what is missing, over the following weeks. This is why the old PC stays intact.

Microsoft and third-party transfer tools

Windows no longer ships a first-party migration tool of the kind that existed in Windows 7. What Microsoft offers now is the Microsoft account and OneDrive, and within their scope they work well.

Commercial tools such as Laplink PCmover claim to move installed applications, and they do work for some software by copying registry entries and files together. Be realistic about it: success varies by application, anything with hardware-tied activation or a licensing service will likely need reactivating anyway, and you can end up with an application that half-works in a way that is harder to diagnose than a clean install. For a machine with a dozen ordinary programs, reinstalling is faster and ends in a cleaner result.

Where these tools genuinely earn their price is a specialist workstation with decades of accumulated configuration that nobody documented. That is a real situation and not the usual one.

What not to do

• Do not copy the Program Files folder. Programs are not self-contained. You get a folder of files and an application that will not start.
• Do not wipe or sell the old PC for at least a month. Something is always missed.
• Do not skip the licence key collection on the assumption you can find them later. Later is after the old machine has gone.
• Do not transfer the old antivirus. Install the current version fresh, and consider whether Windows Security is sufficient, which for most people it is.
• Do not copy across years of accumulated junk just because it is there. A new PC is a rare opportunity to not carry forward three copies of a 2021 backup folder.

Phones are a different problem

If you are also moving a phone, none of this applies — phone-to-phone migration uses the manufacturer’s own tools and works far better than PC migration does. Moving photos off a phone to the new PC is its own task, covered in iPhone photos not showing on your PC and Android phone not showing up on PC over USB.

What to expect

Files and browser data land on the new machine within an hour or two. The software reinstallation realistically spreads over a week, because you discover what you need as you need it rather than all at once, and that is a perfectly reasonable way to do it.

The one thing worth accepting up front is that the new PC will not be identical to the old one. Some program you relied on is no longer sold, some setting you configured in 2020 you no longer remember making, and some file was in a place you never thought to look. Keeping the old machine on a shelf, intact and bootable, turns every one of those from a crisis into a ten-minute errand.