With the end of Microsoft’s support for the venerable Windows XP operating system now firmly in sight, the company has launched a free tool designed to make it easy for users to upgrade to a newer version of the Windows OS.
Announced today in a blog post, the PCmover Express software – a product of a partnership with Laplink, and essentially a pared down version of its paid-for PCmover software – will migrate a user’s files and settings from a Windows XP machine to a new device running Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1.
It’ll happily copy across files, music, videos, email, user profiles and settings from your old PC to a new machine across your home or work network, and also allows you to specify exactly what you want to copy across, just in case you’d rather leave the accumulated junk behind.
The software will be available for download in English later this week via WindowsXP.com. Later in March, it will be available in French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. It will then be made available in Korean, Chinese, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese at an as-yet unspecified time in the future.
To ensure you don’t forget that XP is about to be put out to pasture, starting March 8 XP Home and Professional users who have Windows Update switched on will receive desktop notifications reminding them that support is about to end.
And April 8 is the date that XP support expires, just in case you had forgotten.
Featured Image Credit – Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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