Monday, January 13, 2020

New PC and troubles with PCMover

It's been five years and I got a new PC.  Bigger and faster.  Now I've got to transfer everything over from the old PC.  Alas I got burned again by PCMover, same as the last time.  I'm making this blog post so maybe I will avoid it in future.

The problem with PC Mover Pro is that you think it does more than it does.  I have the illusion that you plug both PCs in an Ethernet router, start PCMover on both and shazam.  But no.  It starts OK then it gives a vague message about network problems and stalls, so little or no progress is made.  (The same thing happened to me five years ago.) And it's up to me to debug what's wrong.  If it can't fix the problems itself, it ought to at least diagnose what is wrong and not leave me to guess.  I'm disabling services, turning off firewalls and anti-virus and still no work.  I give up.  It's easier to transfer the data files using Windows, and then re-install the programs.  No mysteries there, it just takes time.

Here's my plan:

Install on my new PC:

Adobe Flash Player (alas)
Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements
Adobe Reader
Chess Hero
EXIF file date changer
Family Historian
Chrome, Firefox and Opera  web browsers
HP Printer Assistant
iTunes
Java
MS Office Pro
MS Visual Studio
MUP music authoring program
Net Uptime Monitor
PUTTY
Seagate Dashboard
Turbotax
WD SmartWare and URL
WinSCP FTP program

Uninstall on my new PC:

McAfee antivirus
Sample version of Office