PC Relocator Makes Moving Files a Snap

I think my mother must have had the original computer. Or at least pieces of it.

She’d been a cautious upgrader through the years. It wouldn’t do just to buy a new box.

Instead, she favored swapping out parts as needed. It got to where her Cyrix 686-based system had all the zip of a three-toed sloth rolling a wheelchair underwater.

Finally, she got new investment management software that absolutely required a bottom-up upgrade.

Mom was the perfect candidate for Alohabob’s PC Relocator, now in version 4.0.

This program from a 3-year-old Sunrise, Fla., company called Eisenworld fills an enormous need that Microsoft Corp. has neglected: helping us painlessly transfer our files and settings from a dying machine to a new one.

Microsoft’s XP ships with the ever-unreliable File and Settings Transfer Wizard. Some wizard. It’s like Merlin with a rubber wand. Flaccid. I’ve tried it several times.

PC Relocator, by contrast, keeps getting better. The $49.95 software is not flawless but pretty darn complete. Eisenworld is promising a range of variations--from a stripped-down basic to an enterprise version--for October.

What PC Relocator does, in addition to moving files and applications, is transfer and merge software settings to your new PC’s registry, or basic instruction database, without altering the old PC.

The program is designed, additionally, not to overwrite any software drivers on the new system.

So off I go. First I connect both machines--I’ll call them Sloth (the no-name Cyrix 686) and Screamer (with a 2.26-gigahertz Intel processor and 80-gigabyte hard drive)--to my home Ethernet network.

You also can use a parallel cable (the slowest means, 1 gigabyte in two to five hours) or Universal Serial Bus port (1 gigabyte per hour). Or you can “hotel” the data in intermediate media such as CD-RW discs or external hard drives.

My advice: Get networked. Everything’s faster.

I install PC Relocator on both machines and perform one bit of housekeeping before I start my transfer: Because Sloth (running Windows 98) had three partitions among two separate hard drives I run PowerQuest’s Partition Magic utility on Screamer, creating three partitions on its single hard drive.

If, like most people, you’ve got only one hard-disk partition (C Drive) on your old PC, you won’t need to do this.

Here’s where the fun begins.

New features in PC Relocator give you the option of separately transferring your applications, user profile, settings and preferences and documents and other files. Then you can choose individual settings, applications and files.

Some--very few--programs and files didn’t transfer.

But everything else did beautifully--480 megabytes’ worth of data moved to their new home in 11 minutes and 31 seconds.