Introduction

Just as the name suggests, the Belkin Easy Transfer Cable for Windows Vista allows you to transfer your old files from a Windows XP machine over to a newly setup Windows Vista PC in just a few easy steps.

The Windows Easy Transfer Wizard automatically appears and lets you select some—or all—items to copy.

With a couple of clicks, your photos, music, settings, and more transfer, without requiring time-consuming CD-burning or a network.

·         Transfers files in three quick and easy steps: 1. Install - 2. Connect - 3. Transfer

·         Automatically transfers your photos, music, files, email, user accounts, Windows settings—and more

·         Eliminates need to set up a complex network, or spend hours burning CDs to copy data

·         Transfers 30GB of data in just 1 hour... or, just 1 hour to transfer 7,500 songs to your new PC

·         Offers ideal mobile solution for copying files to and from your notebook, and home and work PCs

·         Faster and easier to transfer data than a network, or copying files to a hard drive or burning CDs

·         Belkin includes FREE file-synchronization software. With "One-Click," PCsync software automatically synchronizes files, folders, music, photos, video—and much more—between your PCs.

Inside the pack you get a two way USB cable with a bulging box in the middle which is the bit that helps with the transfer. You also get a CD which includes the Windows Easy Transfer for Windows XP, you don’t need to install anything on Windows Vista as the software has already been included in the operating system itself.

The next thing you do is to load up the application on the Windows XP machine that you want to transfer you files from. The next thing that you need to do is to move over to your new Windows Vista machine and then start up the Windows Easy Transfer on there, it is easy to find as it is in the Start>Accessories>Systems Tools folder.

Once you have loaded the software it will tell you to make sure you shut down any applications that might hinder the transfer, these are usually as most likely an Anti-Virus program. It will then as you if this machine is a new one or an old one, once you have selected new and that you are using an Easy Transfer Cable, you just wait for a few moments while it connects up to the other computer.

Now return to your old PC and then tell the program that you wise to use a cable to transfer your files. It only takes a few seconds for the connection to come up. Finally all that you need to do now is tell the program what you want to transfer over. The default option is for all user accounts, files and settings which is what most users will go with, but there are other more advanced options if you wish to use them.

For example, if you know the files you want to transfer you can go to the advanced options and then specify what file it is that you want to transfer over, it is a very easy process that just about anyone can do.

The default is that the Easy Transfer software will copy over your My Documents Folders, Email messages and settings along with program settings and the user accounts, but as you would expect, it won’t transfer over programs so you will need to make sure that they are up and running on Windows Vista before you run the transferring of settings.

The performance of the cable is very good, to make sure that the test was as fair as possible we did a transfer of files between one Windows Vista machine with USB 2.0 and a Windows XP Laptop (Acer) with USB 2.0. As seems to be the case with a lot of moving around of files, large files we transferred very fast with a single 1GB file taking just under four minutes, but transferring a large amount of small files seemed to take ages, it took us 10 minutes to transfer over 1GB of small files.

Overall

So overall I’m impressed with the Belkin Easy Transfer Cable for Windows Vista, it does exactly what you both expect of it and hope it will do, it makes it a lot easy to transfer over files without any hassle and it’s a great idea for computer amateurs or those who just can’t be bothered to network up machines to do it.

Feel free to comment on the review here.