coffee
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 1,832
- Location
- United States
So, I have a client that wanted to upgrade their computers from older Dell XP boxes to Dell Win7pro boxes. I had time to plan this out and did a lot of homework to see what all I would encounter. I would be in on a saturday and complete the switch over that day. I wanted to do this of course as quickly as possible with little headaches.
I remembered a lot of techs talking about fabs autobackup and investigated it. I ended up buying a copy of fabs and playing around with it on my win7 VM. Here is what I encountered :
Fabs autobackup (fabs) is probably one of the best thought out programs I have encountered for windows. Its a stand alone program to backup files, and user configurations to migrate from one computer to another. Upgrading from XP to win7 was certainly a lot easier usings fabs. This is a great time saver. What I did was I had a thumb drive with fabs on it and an external 500 gig drive. I would run fabs on the xp computer and all I had to do was basically accept the defaults and tell it where to back up too.
Restoring is pretty easy. Make sure you have your programs installed after swapping out the computers. Things like thunderbird mail, MS Office ect... When I did my restore it completed within a few minutes and was quite fast. Then I just rebooted. What I did find was - If you belong to a domain then there were 2 accounts to restore. You have what I suspect the local login and the domain login accounts. Be sure to backup the domain account other wise, When you login to windows on your domain account none of your stuff will be there.
Fabs was most definitely worth the money to buy it. It cut the work load down quite a bit and made everything quite easy. I did have to go in and install printers but that is quite easy to do. The real benefit is that when the worker comes back to work their computer looks and pretty much acts just like their old one. They feel right at home switching from XP to 7. You get very few follow up calls from the client. Thats a plus right there.
So, If you have not done it - Go out and buy a copy of Fabs and play around with it. Its easy to use and saves you a lot of headaches. Its very worth the money!
coffee
I remembered a lot of techs talking about fabs autobackup and investigated it. I ended up buying a copy of fabs and playing around with it on my win7 VM. Here is what I encountered :
Fabs autobackup (fabs) is probably one of the best thought out programs I have encountered for windows. Its a stand alone program to backup files, and user configurations to migrate from one computer to another. Upgrading from XP to win7 was certainly a lot easier usings fabs. This is a great time saver. What I did was I had a thumb drive with fabs on it and an external 500 gig drive. I would run fabs on the xp computer and all I had to do was basically accept the defaults and tell it where to back up too.
Restoring is pretty easy. Make sure you have your programs installed after swapping out the computers. Things like thunderbird mail, MS Office ect... When I did my restore it completed within a few minutes and was quite fast. Then I just rebooted. What I did find was - If you belong to a domain then there were 2 accounts to restore. You have what I suspect the local login and the domain login accounts. Be sure to backup the domain account other wise, When you login to windows on your domain account none of your stuff will be there.
Fabs was most definitely worth the money to buy it. It cut the work load down quite a bit and made everything quite easy. I did have to go in and install printers but that is quite easy to do. The real benefit is that when the worker comes back to work their computer looks and pretty much acts just like their old one. They feel right at home switching from XP to 7. You get very few follow up calls from the client. Thats a plus right there.
So, If you have not done it - Go out and buy a copy of Fabs and play around with it. Its easy to use and saves you a lot of headaches. Its very worth the money!
coffee
