transferring applications and settings from Vista to XP

[Amara]

I am looking at buying a new laptop from Dell that comes with Vista pre-installed on it. I plan on making an exact copy of my old XP hard drive and replacing the contents of my new hard drive with the contents of my old one. I plan on doing this with a little device and its software made by apricorn. The only problem I am forseeing is that I want to have Microsoft Office on my new computer. I was thinking I could have that pre-installed on my new computer and then copy over the application data and settings over to my XP hard drive before doing the entire copy over Vista. Is this possible to do and how would I do it? Does anyone have any other suggestions to accomplish this besides buying it and installing it myself? Oh, and I don't want to have a dual boot between XP and Vista either. Thanks!

[y2khardtop]

I would never copy all of the application data, and the coruption that piles along with it, to a new PC. Also, the documents/music/pictures etc are arranged in different folders with Vista than with XP.

I'd suggest just copying your data to an external hard drive (or flash drive if you don't have much data). For me, this simply includes copying the Documents folder and the desktop folder (I keep data on my desktop for my kids), then just transfer it into the appropriate folders on Vista.

It sounds like you may have your copy of office customized in some way....I'm sure there is a way to import those settings, but I don't know for sure.

[Scarecrow Man]

agree with y2k . what are you intending to back up?