The vast majority of computer users will obtain Vista by purchasing a new machine and not by upgrading one of their old PCs.

Vivanco's Easy Transfer Cable is aimed at those who opt to buy a new system and need to move their old files and settings to the new Vista PC.

It's a 2.4m USB cable with regular USB heads at each end so it can plug into two computers. An orange box sits halfway between the two and contains hardware that identifies itself as an Easy Transfer Cable, which Vista supports natively, so software only needs to be installed on the XP machine.

Two options are available for transferring software. First there's Windows Easy Transfer software that guides you step by step to transferring user accounts, folders and files (in particular common music, picture and video folders), program and internet settings, email accounts and various other personal settings.

Despite the large amount of data being transferred, the process is a simple one and it works well, covering any combination of XP and Vista machines.

For a greater control over what gets transferred, Vivanco includes Laplink PCSync. This software can be used to schedule times when two computers should synchronise their files. It can also show two Explorer-like windows to transfer files and folders to and fro.

We found minor bugs with it though. It repeatedly threw up an error for a small folder of images and we also noticed the connection would time out after a period of inactivity, meaning we had to restart the program.

On our test machines, small files transferred at around 2Mbytes/sec, which is a lot slower than, for example, using an external hard drive or wired network. However, for novice users it's a simple was to migrate to a Vista PC.