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How do I migrate from my old to my new Dell Latitude?
Latitude 7330
How do I migrate the C: drive from my old Latitude E7250 to my new Latitude 7330?
I just bought a new Dell Latitude 7330. It's not cheap. I'm lost in the birdsnest of Dell support pages and promotions.
I've found the "Dell Migrate" page, and it does not include "Latitude" in its compatible products. Both laptops are on the same network. I have admin privileges on both laptops.
How do I migrate the old system to the new laptop?
I'm technical. In the old days, I would do a disk clone. I have backups (I use Acronis) and I suppose I can use the Acronis tools to restore the old system onto the new laptop. That seems like a hack and kludge.
I invite the guidance of this community (and perhaps of anyone from Dell who might be reading) about the best way to get my stuff migrated from my old to my new Dell laptop.
ejn63
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March 19th, 2023 08:00
There is no harm in trying to migrate the system, but it's essentially like building a new house on an old, suspect foundation. No one (not Dell, and certainly not Microsoft) completely supports migrating an existing install of an operating system to foreign hardware, particularly when the differences are those of hardware released almost 8 years apart. However, I would strongly suggest making and verifying an image of the new drive, as should support be necessary, it'll be denied without restoring that before Dell would offer assistance on the installation.
And there is generally good reason for not migrating a registry that's been in use for some time, in terms of the clutter it contains.
Further, it's unlikely you'll be able to activate an existing Windows install once it's migrated over to a completely different system board, at least not without a call to Microsoft.
ejn63
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March 19th, 2023 04:00
It depends on what the "old system" is, but you're better off copying the data files to external media, and installing everything else (programs) anew on the new system.
SomervilleTom
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March 19th, 2023 08:00
I appreciate your attention, thanks for the reply.
The old system is a Dell Latitude E7250 running Windows 10 Pro. The new system is a Dell Latitude 7330 running Windows 10 Pro.
It sounds as if you're implicitly saying that Dell offers no support for this operation. That's disappointing.
The rub with manually doing as you say as that many of things that are tedious to restore are kept in places like the registry and hidden folders (such as the many hidden folders under "C:Users". My experience in the past has been that such information is often missed by a simple file/directory copy.
The appeal of a tool like Acronis is that it is more likely to capture and migrate those than if I do the same by hand.
I do miss the era when I could simply clone the C drive to the new system and reboot.
In any case, if Dell offers no tool than I'll do something by hand.
SomervilleTom
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March 24th, 2023 11:00
I accepted this as a solution because I reluctantly agree with it.
I've wasted days trying to perform this task with a tool of some sort. Since "Dell Migrate" tool is a loser, I tried the several Acronis "solutions" -- they are just as bad or worse.
It appears that the industry, after years of dedicated effort, has finally succeeded at making it impossible for any mere mortal to accomplish a migration like this -- a migration that every PC/Laptop user has to make every few years.
As it turns out, this specific machine is for a family member -- who happens to be a PhD human geneticist.
The actual learning from this is that I must redouble my efforts to break our Microsoft addiction in favor of Linux. This kind of migration is (still) straightforward with Linux.
This Dell Latitude 7330 is my very last Windows machine.