EaseUS Todo PCTrans Review 2026 — The Easiest Way to Move to a New PC

Buying a new PC used to mean losing a weekend. Reinstalling Office, hunting down browser bookmarks, remembering which folder held your tax returns, praying that Adobe's activation would still work. EaseUS Todo PCTrans exists to make that weekend disappear. After migrating two full Windows setups between machines with PCTrans Pro — a 2020 ThinkPad with 380GB of data to a fresh 2026 desktop, and a family member's Dell with twelve years of accumulated software — we can say the tool delivers almost exactly what the marketing promises. Here is the honest breakdown.

Three Migration Types, One Tool

PCTrans is not a single feature. It is three migration paths bundled under one interface, and picking the right one matters more than most guides explain.

1. PC to PC — the zero-hardware path

Install PCTrans on both machines, put them on the same Wi-Fi or wired network, and PCTrans streams directly from old to new. No external drive needed, no cloud upload, no USB stick juggling. Transfer speeds are bound by your network — on a gigabit wired link, we saw roughly 70–90MB/s sustained; on Wi-Fi 6, 40–55MB/s. A 200GB migration took us around 45 minutes wired.

2. Backup and restore — the image path

If the machines cannot meet on the same network (common when a new PC is shipped before the old one leaves, or when someone is switching offices), PCTrans writes a migration image to an external drive. Plug the drive into the new PC, PCTrans restores. Slower than direct transfer, but it works regardless of network state and lets you keep the image as a fallback for a week or two — useful when you realise on Thursday that you forgot to migrate your video editor's preset library.

3. App migration on the same PC

This one surprised us. If your C: drive is filling up, PCTrans can move installed applications — with their registry entries, dependencies, and shortcuts — from one drive to another on the same machine. Windows' built-in "Move" option only works for Microsoft Store apps. PCTrans handles traditional .exe installs too, including heavyweights like Adobe Premiere.

The Migration Process, Step by Step

Install PCTrans on both machines. Open it on both. Pick "PC to PC". PCTrans auto-detects the other machine on the network within ten seconds — you confirm by clicking the machine name. Choose "scan", and PCTrans inventories every installed application, user folder, and system setting on the source. You then tick what to transfer — granular enough that you can exclude a 60GB game you no longer play while keeping the game's save files. Hit "transfer" and walk away.

Our 200GB run included Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop + Lightroom + Premiere), three browsers with all bookmarks and logged-in sessions, VS Code with every extension, a password manager, our VPN client, and roughly 120GB of documents and photos. Start to finish: 45 minutes wired. When the new PC rebooted, everything worked. Office activated without re-entering a key. Chrome opened to the same tabs. The VPN was already connected. This is the experience the marketing promises and, in our test, the experience we got.

What Transfers Cleanly

Microsoft Office suite — full migration, license intact, custom templates preserved
Adobe Creative Cloud — apps and settings transfer; Adobe's own licensing then re-verifies online on first launch
Browsers with profiles — Chrome, Edge, Firefox all move with bookmarks, extensions, saved logins, and history
Productivity tools — Notion, Slack, Obsidian, Todoist all transferred with their local caches
User folders — Documents, Pictures, Videos, Desktop all move in full
Custom ODBC and printer configurations — saved us a two-hour IT ticket on the family member's machine

What Doesn't Transfer (and PCTrans Tells You)

Hardware-locked software — anything activated against a specific motherboard, MAC address, or TPM — is flagged by PCTrans beforethe migration runs. You see a yellow warning icon next to the affected app, click it, and PCTrans explains that the vendor's licensing will need a fresh activation on the new hardware. In practice this caught:

An older version of AutoCAD with a per-seat activation
A bank's corporate VPN client tied to the source machine's hardware fingerprint
One game launcher with anti-tamper DRM that required a fresh install

No silent failures. No "it moved but now refuses to launch" surprises. The vendor lock-ins that exist are surfaced up front, and you decide whether to migrate the app anyway (knowing you'll reactivate) or skip it.

The Security Angle Most Reviews Miss

If you take security seriously, migrating is the moment your protection can silently break. Your VPN settings, your password manager vault, your antivirus configuration, your 2FA backup codes — all of it needs to land on the new machine intact, or you start day one exposed.

PCTrans preserves these. Our NordPass vault moved with the app. Our ProtonVPN killswitch settings and custom DNS came across untouched. Bitdefender's scheduled-scan rules migrated as the application did. You are not rebuilding your security posture from scratch on a new machine — you are arriving with it already configured. This is the single biggest reason we recommend PCTrans over copying user folders manually: manual copying strips the security context and leaves you reconfiguring under pressure.

Pricing — and Why It Matters

PCTrans is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. Pro license covers one machine per seat; the Technician and Lifetime tiers cover multiple seats and include free upgrades. A free tier exists but caps total transfer at 2GB and limits app migration to two applications — useful for trying the workflow, not enough for a real migration.

Compared to the alternatives — paying for a professional "data migration service" at a computer shop (£100–£200 in the UK, often more), or burning 8–16 hours of your own time manually reinstalling everything — the Pro license pays for itself on the first migration. We used ours for two migrations and still have the license.

Our Verdict: 4.3/5

EaseUS Todo PCTrans does exactly what PC migration tooling should do: move a working Windows setup onto new hardware without forcing you to rebuild your life. The PC-to-PC path is fast, the image path is reliable, and the honest up-front reporting on hardware-locked software removes the worst category of migration surprise. Rating: 4.3/5. The only reason it isn't a 4.5 or higher is that the interface still feels a generation behind modern Windows design — functional, but not elegant. For the job it does, though, it is the tool we reach for.

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