John Robb: “Microsoft, despite the mountains of logic that dictate that they should, has never made it easy to migrate to new hardware.”
True. And, it's something that all Microsoft employees should care about. Particularly those of us who need to reformat our machines every few days to test new things.
What's my solution? I put everything I can into Outlook (all my business files, etc) that I can (one .PST file to copy that way). And I keep very tight controls on where I put other things so I can easily back them up.
By the way, Windows XP does come with a “Files and Settings Transfer Wizard” which does help quite a bit. [The Scobleizer Weblog]