PC to PC programme transfer

If you have the key codes you can usually go to the software vendor website to download and install the latest version... If you have files to transfer, then I would copy those to a separate drive, and install to the new pc's from that...

We have all of the codes, all of the software is legitimate but I was hoping not to have to reinstall everything from scratch.

Here you go.

How to clone a hard drive

If you clone, is it a problem if you have the old OS serial number? I cloned a 1TB drive to a 2TB drive, no problem, except I did have to upgrade to Win10 Professional to make it happen.

We have cloned drives before as you & WJMFIRE have suggested but this is transferring from one Windows PC to another. The 2 PCs will have different Windows serial numbers so I didn't think that a simple clone would work.

It depends on how many computers are on the license, if only 3 are paid for then you need to buy 3 more....unless you want to share the licensed hard drives as a separate drive to the new pc's...

https://www.bestvirtualparalegal.com/how-to-link-two-computers-to-one-external-hard-drive

Usually worst case I’ll end up having to load new device drivers for some peripherals, the basic VGA driver gets your video going. I’ve only done Dell to Dell, Toshiba to Toshiba, HP to HP. Sometimes had to start in Protected Mode for difficult upgrades. Cloning from Dell to HP might be a little more work.

Iused to use a programme called GHOST which was later bought by Symantic and they have there own programme SSR but GHOST is still available I believe.

I used to clone our PCs for the PLC programmes and do it every time a major update was made. It worked flawlessly and when a computer died, often with ding dong ----s as they seemed to be prone to crashing, it was just a matter of returning the cloned software to the formatted computer.

As you can imagine when a downtime event costing $40,000 per hour occurred it was best to get it back up and running ASAP.

I think we used Ghost when we last upgraded the HDD drives to SSDs in our current PCs. I still have a basic question of how this would work copying to a new PC when the 2 Win10 OS will have different serial Nos.

How one can legally do this depends on the publishers of your business software. The files these programs create with your input are the proprietary property of your company and can be cloned, and moved anywhere without any worries. The programs that read, and provide editing access to these files can usually be easily reinstalled in the upgraded computers as long as no two computers with the same license are online at the same time.

Sometimes a software license is keyed to the OS license and a simple migration cannot be performed. Occasionally an OS change (Win 10 -> 11, Win -> Epics) will prevent the old development software from working. On a rare occasion but legally significant scenario the development software has been obsoleted and is no longer supported when a transfer to a new machine is mandatory. The solution here is to make a virtual machine utilizing the old OS and OS license within the new machine.