Moving personality profiles from another OS to Windows 2000 used to be a tedious process. These tools can turbo-charge that task.
User Migrations: PC Transplant Pro 2.1
Moving personality profiles from another OS to Windows 2000 used to be a tedious process. These tools can turbo-charge that task.
Altiris’ PC Transplant Pro 2.1 is offered as a stand-alone
product or as part of the Altiris eXpress Migration Toolkit.
PC Transplant Pro’s a simple, wizard-based program that
scans your computer based upon selections you make, either
within the wizard or from a previously saved template.
PC Transplant Pro compiles the selected profile and creates
a self-executing package, which you can then transfer
and run on the new computer. The use of a self-extracting
package is convenient, since you don’t need to install
PC Transplant Pro on the destination system to load the
personality package.
 |
| Figure 1. PC Transplant uses
a wizard interface to build profiles. |
Learning PC Transplant’s advanced features
is no problem, thanks to the excellent documentation.
It’s so easy that a normal user should be able to create
and restore a personality package in minutes with little
or no direction. I was most impressed by the release notes
for version 2.1. The documentation, including current
limitations and troubleshooting solutions for known problems,
was very useful and didn’t take hours of reading to extract.
 |
| Figure 2. Using PC Transplant
Pro 2.1’s package editor, settings can be changed
without re-creating the package. (Click image to view
larger version.) |
PC Transplant Pro captures more than 100
customized settings for Windows 95/98, Me, NT and 2000,
as well as settings for more than 50 popular business
applications. Settings include active desktop, taskbar,
wallpaper, icons, mouse and colors; network settings such
as computer name, drive mappings, and folder and directories
share assignments; and application settings, including
data files, templates, contacts and calendar items (Altiris
offers online updates to add more applications as they
become available). Additionally, PC Transplant Pro can
scan for and transfer any type of file, as well as entire
directory structures. It offers advanced features to assist
administrators, including the ability to create personality
templates, which can automate personality package creation.
The process can be executed from the command line, and
packages can be password-protected. PC Transplant Pro
includes a package-editing tool, which allows you to modify
a package directly without having to re-create it. Disk-imaging
software is included as part of the PC Transplant Pro
package, so you don’t need to purchase additional cloning
tools. The one thing missing from PC Transplant Pro is
a method of centrally managing the personality packages
you create. In a large organization, this could be thousands
of files; depending on what’s being saved, these files
could be very large. Be aware of this limitation when
comparing programs. Overall, PC Transplant Pro’s an easy-to-use
tool and makes the transfer of a computer’s unique personality
quick and painless.
About the Author
Stewart Cawthray, MCSE, ITIL Service Manager, is an IT management consultant for Hewlett-Packard.