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How to / Should I move ATI 2010 from XP to new Windows 7 hardware

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I have been an Acronis user for many years and recently experienced reliability problems with the Windows XP laptop where ATI Home 2010 (build 7046) is installed. Despite concluding that the reliability issues are most probably a result of some incompatibility with Windows XP and the gobs of software loaded on the 6-year old computer, I recently upgraded my hardware to a SSD-based Windows 7 desktop with 8GB RAM which seems much more stable.

I have run both systems in parallel for the past week and am ready to move my data over to the new system by restoring an Acronis backup onto an unused area of the 1TB SATA HDD where I store secondary programs and data in the new system.

Reading some of the posts about problems with ATI Home 2010 and Windows 7, I am not sure if this approach is advisable:

1) Should I attempt to boot the Windows 7 computer from the Acronis recovery disk and restore to some area of the HDD?

2) After the migration, should I uninstall ATI Home 2010 from the Windows XP laptop and install the program on the Windows 7 machine?

3) Or should I use the internal Windows 7 backup functionality, Cobian Backup, or something else?

Thanks for any advice...

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Brian,

You are better off moving your data using the recovery CD. If this include programs, you cannot move them to Win7 using Acronis, you will have to reinstall the programs.

After the migration, if you want to use your current copy of ATI 2010, you will have to uninstall it from your old computer to comply with licensing requirements.

The Win7 backup utility is great, but doesn't support as many backup destination options. If you have Win7 pro or ultimate, you can do system images as well with Win7. I end up using ATI for regular daily incremental images of my system SSD, plus a Win7 backup as a redundant backup on another destination.

Thanks for the advice, Pat. I am using Win 7 Ulitmate but have not used the Win 7 Backup function yet.
I'll see if the Acronis recovery CD will boot and restore the XP data.

Some follow-up from the OP. The Acronis restore was very easy. In Win7 I created a partition slightly larger than my WindowsXP archive and assigned it a drive letter. Booting from the Acronis recovery disk, I restored the WindowsXP archive to the new partition. After the restore operation, I rebooted from Win7 and the entire c: file structure appeared as F:!

The only problem now is moving the applications from F: to E: (my new application partition). The inactive system registry on F: uses hard-coded references to C:\ paths. I checked with the Laplink people about PCMover (which I have successfuly used in the past), Application Mover, and even a legacy application called "Aloha Bob", but I could not find any applications to make the registry changes. I'm also not brave enough to do a global search and replace of c:\ to f:\ on the f: registry. So I guess I'll just have to manually reinstall 10 year collection of applications.

As for Acronis, the Win7 Backup utility is limited to a single backup profile which makes it a "one-trick pony" relative to the versatility I've become accustomed to with ATI. I also tried Cobian backup, but although I like the clean UI, it seems realtively slow compared to ATI. I think I will move my licensed copy of ATIH10 over to the new machine.

But before I do, does anyone have any further information regarding reported incompatibilities between ATI and Win7?

Thanks.

Make sure you use the latest build of ATI 2010 (not v10, which precedes v11, itself preceding 2009). v10 will not work within Windows 7