The tool allows you to copy profiles from a Windows XP system to any other newer operating system, exactly what I needed. This allowed me to essentially migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7 64-bit without losing user's local data, yet still refreshing all of the systems with a new copy of Windows 7. We use a custom image that is built through sysprep and Ghost. I won't go into those details of that here but if you are imaging the systems with your own custom image or installing Windows 7 fresh, the procedure remains pretty much the same.
1) Start by installing/imaging Windows to a hard drive.
2) Get the new system to the point where you are ready to deploy it to the user. For us, this means installing their custom software, updates, and the anti-virus program that we use.
3) Contact the user and ask if you can begin backing up their computer. They don't need to know the details of this, just that you are backing up their files so that they do not lose them when you upgrade their system.
4) Start the Windows Easy File Transfer tool on the Windows XP system. We actually deployed the software to all of the machines through a tool called PDQ Deploy, cutting out the step of installing the transfer tool
5) When the transfer tool starts it will scan the system for any local profiles. Select the profiles you wish to save, we exclude most except for the actual user who is using that computer, and the shared files.
6) Save the files to a network drive or USB flash drive. They can be rather large (ours range from 400MB to 3GB) so be prepared to have some extra space available.
7) When the easy file transfer file has been created, return to the Windows 7 machine and import the profiles into the system.
8) Swap out the Windows 7 hard drive with the current Windows XP hard drive and boot it up. When the user logs in they will see all of their Desktop icons, files, and some application settings will even migrate over. This saves us time as printers and Outlook settings generally are already there when they log into their new system.
It's saved my IT team a ton of time as we are able to essentially upgrade the systems to a new hard drive offsite, swap out the hard drives on site, and the user can login and start working. If I hadn't found and realized the power of the Windows Easy File Transfer tool this migration would be taking months. Today we are down to only about 20% XP machines and will be completed with the migration in the next two weeks. Thank you Microsoft for making something right, my time thanks you!
