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R E V I E W

Disk Imaging Gets a Makeover

September 30, 2002
By Cornell W. Robinson III

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MS Add-Ons

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Altiris Deployment Solution
	Other Products Reviewed
	Executive Summary
	How We Tested
	MS Add-Ons
	Report Card

Microsoft offers a free utility that supports Windows 2000 and Windows XP migrations. You can find the User State Migration Tool (USMT) on Microsoft's Web site or on the Resource Kit CDs for Windows 2000 and XP.

USMT includes two command-line tools that can capture and restore users' personal data, facilitating migration or restoration of a work-station. To use USMT we had to create an .inf file that would define what information to capture. Unfortunately, creating the .inf file was no easy task. We spent lots of time learning the syntax, and we had to know quite a bit about the Windows registry and environment variables to pull files and registry keys from the right places. Microsoft did provide a helpful white paper, but USMT couldn't compete with migration utilities provided by specialized packages.

Windows XP features a wizard, appropriately dubbed the "Files and Settings Transfer Wizard," that made migration a lot easier. It let us migrate standard files and settings by sending them to a network share, and we could specify the files we wanted to capture based on file type, folders or specific file names. This tool is cake compared with USMT but is available only for Windows XP.