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For people in this situation, there's a product called PCMover from Laplink which we've used successfully on a lot of migrations. It can do XP -> 7, with documents, settings, and installed software, usually with almost no trouble at all. It's well worth the 50 bucks or so.

Unfortunately, the product has a bug that completely kills software updates in Windows 8 systems, and even after we had purchased dozens of licenses of their software and gone to the trouble of narrowing down the scope of the bug to a "definitely a PCMover bug" range, their support personnel refused to look into it and pretty much told us to take or leave their product.

So we quit using it, since we're trying to get all of our XP-using customers to skip 7 and go directly to 8.

But yeah, it's a much bigger pain in the butt for a lot of people than a lot of people seem to realize.

Microsoft also have an "Windows Easy Transfer" - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/feature... - but read the FAQ to find out that it doesn't transfer apps.

In addition to doing an upgrade, users also have to use some other random pieces of software which may be paid, and not a single one will guarantee that your new system will be like your old one. Still a very hard sell.

Intel and Microsoft could make it easy for desktop customers to move to a new desktop and use their old hard drive to run Windows XP in a virtual machine, alongside Windows 10 which includes Hyper-V.

The only upgrade Intel cares about is the purchase of a new system. That is why Intel is taking a revenue hit.

Yes, but the majority of what I wrote applies to new systems too. What a user wants is the exact configuration of their old system to be on their new system. By that I mean installed apps, services, data, registration info, passwords, whatever they have littering their desktop etc. This is still beyond painful, not to mention having to learn new UI etc.

You can upgrade from XP to Vista, and then from Vista to 7. (Although there are some restrictions of which versions of Vista/7 you have to come from and go to, but not insurmountable.)

That said, the VM in which I'm currently testing that process is having some difficulty, for reasons obscured by an always helpful 0x8000000000-type error code.

If you skipped Vista, then how would a regular person go about acquiring Vista so they could upgrade to 7? Also having to do two upgrades is even more painful.

> Then new UI has to be learned. Nothing is where it was. Various apps probably had to be upgraded too, and they'll have new UI to learn too.

Is this really such a problem though (ignoring Windows 8)? Most people upgrade their phones every 2 years, when they upgrade it's probably going to be completely different from what they had before, esepcially taking into account each manufacturer having their own skinned UI and widgets. Even on the same device, popular apps like Facebook and Spotify have gone through many redesigns, but people cope. Why are PCs any different?

There will obviously be a distribution of people. But those who haven't upgraded from XP yet are more likely to find changes disruptive. You should have heard stories about installing alternate browsers and having to change the icon to that of Internet Explorer, because users know the IE icon is how you "connect to the Internet".

Similarly the complaints about the MS Office ribbon interface are rarely about its actual functionality, but rather about it being different than before.

You are right about phone upgrades, but they are far more incremental with only regular small changes across apps and the phone OS. That is far easier to adapt to, than the OS and apps all changing after years of no changes.