The arrival of Microsoft's new baby, Windows Vista, has encouraged many people to think about upgrading their computer as well as their software, especially as most new machines come with Vista already installed.

Unfortunately this presents you with the PC owner's nightmare: transferring all your files, applications and software from the old machine to the new without spending weeks in the process and losing data because of incompatibility between old and new operating systems.

There are, of course, a few software packages (like Nova's IntelliMover) which will copy your folders for you, but not many that handle applications, and the big plus with PCmover is that it will transfer applications, files and settings in one simple operation. All you have to do is install the software on both the old and new computers and then link them via the (supplied) USB 2.0 cable, parallel port or your private network and set the process under way.

Note that an application’s migration has to be within the terms of its licence, though; this is not a quick way of circumventing a Microsoft licence on Office, for example. Unless you have a retail licence on the product, you won’t be able to get it to run on a new PC anyway, as it’s only Activate-able on the PC on which it was first installed.

Time taken for migration obviously varies with the amount of data you need to transfer but whether it's half an hour or several hours, the reassuring element is the knowledge that you won't have to make several passes before it's complete. You do have the option to perform a 'trial' run which will transfer a certain type of file before you commit to a complete migration.

If your PC has multiple users, all the users' settings and files can be transferred in the same operation, including the security settings. As well as being able to move material from operating systems as diverse as Windows 95, 98, NT, Me and Media Center, PCmover can also export data from a PC to a Mac running Windows OS. As a failsafe, if you're not entirely happy with the settings after you've finished the migration, there is an Undo facility which will restore your new PC to its default settings.

Now while this sounds like an idyllic all-in-one solution, it's not quite as all-encompassing as it might appear. For a start, PCmover is not designed to move data from newer operating systems to older ones; doing so may render your system unbootable, although not many people are likely to want to do this anyway. In addition, certain system settings (e.g. utilities like anti-virus and anti-spyware) may not transfer and any hardware configuration information, such as printer drivers, will not be migrated. Music files with Digital Rights Management and any applications that need special keys or serial numbers may likewise fail to transfer or be incomplete.

Also, should you either want to transfer data from more than one old PC to the new one, or transfer from your new PC to a later upgrade, you'll have to pay again - a download cost of £30 - as your licence only covers one migration.

We think this last factor is unreasonable. OK, the program is designed to perform a single task and that task is one you’re likely to perform rarely, but that’s reflected in the comparatively high asking price of the original software. To demand £30 every time you copy applications and files from one PC to another smacks of greed.

If you've bought a new Vista-enabled PC, this is probably the finest available software to take the pain out of transferring your old data to your new machine in the simplest manner possible. But be aware of its limitations, and note that suppliers of other migration and partitioning applications tend not to charge on a per-migration basis.