What's the best way to transfer files when upgrading from Vista to 7

i'm going from vista-32 to win7-64 soon, so i'll be doing clean install. what is the best way to move the files and settings to the new operating system? is Windows Easy Transfer the way to go? Also, i use programs like stata, that save their files outside of Documents/Downloads/.... Can those be moved too, or it has to be done manually?
i'm using lenovo. is "system migration assistant" for lenovo systems better than "easy transfer"? I only want to transfer the files, but none of the thinkvantage programs. i'll add the ones i need later.

 

Yes, this is a good question. I'd like to know this as well..

Bump.

 

This might be a weird way of doing it, but it worked for me anyway.


Copy the entire user folder in Vista to a separate drive (you might be better off running linux to do this, if you know how).
Do a clean install if you want.
Install the programs you normally use, but don't actually have them load.
Copy the C:\Users\(name)\ back to the location; making sure the username is the same in 7 as it was in Vista, otherwise this doesn't work (without changing a bunch of ini's that direct to the new name).
From there, unless the programs keep settings somewhere else outside of the Appdata folder, you should have all of your old settings from the programs you used before, sans a few registry keys that could break a program or two.


I doubt this works with programs that need licenses to run, but you can try.

 

anyone know where windows live messenger stores emails??? this is my main concern...

 

I'd use the Easy Transfer program. It will tell you which programs it will not work with so you will know exactly what kind of work you have cut out for you.

 

Instead of spending time in migrating programs, I would simply re-install them after the clean install of the OS.

 

I would just move music, movies, documents, etc. to a separate drive on your PC (if you have more than 1 drive with adequate space) or an external hard drive, clean install Windows 7 on the drive you want and just simply copy back the movies, music, documents, etc back to the fresh drive with Windows 7. As for applications, I'm just going to re-install and re-do all the settings. Hassle, but worth it, and makes the OS more "fresh".

 

BestBuy should be sending my pre-ordered Win7 any day now. My plan is to probably buy a second hard drive and install Win7 on it, then copy my data from the first hard drive to it.

Actually my drive has 3 partitions, with the data on D:, so theoretically I can just install Win7 and the data would be untouched. But I'm a careful (read paranoid) guy so I'll probably go for extra backups first.