My wife bought a new laptop and unfortunately it came with Windows 8 pre-installed. But… well… Lets just say that I would have preferred something else.

But anyway… Her previous laptop had Windows 7 and Microsoft has made a nice tool for transferring your files from one computer to another,  the Windows Easy Transfer tool. So copying all the important stuff  from the old Windows 7 laptop to the new Windows 8 laptop really was quick and easy using WLAN connection on our home network.

Then I updated the operating system of the new laptop to Windows 8.1. And then I remembered that Firefox and Thunderbird settings were not copied, but I knew that I could copy them using Windows Easy Transfer using some advanced settings.

Except that Windows Easy Transfer in Windows 8.1 was not so easy anymore. There was no way to connect to the old computer and after some googling I found this.

Windows 8.1 accepts Windows Easy Transfer files stored on a portable drive, but it doesn’t support the Easy Transfer Cable or the network location.

So thank you very much Microsoft. Seriously. WHY? Do you really think everybody is using your SkyDrive?

Fortunately the only data I still needed to transfer were those Firefox and Thunderbird data, and for that purpose there is a nice tool called MozBackup.