What usually gets left behind

Most people remember to copy their files. What they find missing later is everything else they had set up: the bookmarks, the saved logins, the scanner that needed a driver, the licence key for the one paid program, the spreadsheet that lived on the desktop rather than in Documents.

None of it is a big deal on its own, but it tends to turn up one item at a time over several weeks, usually when you need it. Twenty minutes with the checklist below saves most of that.

Check your email settings first

Email is where people actually lose things. If your email was set up years ago, it may be using POP rather than IMAP. IMAP keeps mail on the provider’s server and mirrors it to each device, so setting up a new machine simply downloads it again. POP downloads mail to one computer and, on the older default setting, removes it from the server, so the only copy of years of email can be sitting on the machine you’re about to recycle.

Check before you do anything else. In Outlook it is in Account Settings, where the account will be listed as POP or IMAP. On a webmail account opened in a browser there is nothing to worry about. If it says POP, that mail needs exporting, or the account needs converting to IMAP, before the old machine goes anywhere.

The checklist

Work through this on the old computer while it is still running.

  • Browser bookmarks and saved passwords. Signing into Chrome, Edge or Firefox with the same account on the new machine brings both across. Open a few before you assume it worked.
  • Photos and videos. Including anything sitting in Pictures on the machine itself rather than in a phone’s cloud library. These are the files with no second copy.
  • The desktop and the Downloads folder. People save things there “for now” and forget, so check both.
  • Licence keys for anything paid — the odd bit of accounting software, a photo editor, a game launcher. Usually in the original email, which is another reason to sort email first.
  • Scanner and printer drivers, particularly for older hardware. If a device is more than a few years old, check the manufacturer still publishes a Windows 11 driver before you assume it will work.
  • Anything in a program rather than a file. Sticky Notes, browser tab groups, saved Wi-Fi passwords, a mail signature, autofill addresses.
  • Bank and utility logins you only ever reached through a saved bookmark and a saved password. If both are saved in the old browser and you’ve never typed either, make sure you can still sign in before the old computer goes. In our experience this causes more trouble than lost files.

Set it up properly on day one

Turn on two-factor authentication for your email while you are signing in anyway. Check that the backup of your photos is running rather than assuming it followed you across. Install the software you actually use rather than everything you had, because a fresh machine is also a chance to leave behind the accumulated junk that made the old one slow.

Avoid restoring an old backup wholesale. It brings the clutter back with everything else, and a new computer that feels slow after three weeks has often been given everything from the old one.

Keep the old one for a month

Don’t wipe, sell or recycle it the same week. However careful you are, something will be missed, and it’s easy to fix while the old machine still works. A month is usually long enough. It doesn’t need to stay switched on, just somewhere you can get to it.

Then wipe it properly

Deleting files and emptying the recycle bin doesn’t remove them. The data stays on the drive until something overwrites it, and recovering it is neither difficult nor expensive.

On Windows, Reset this PC with the remove-everything and clean-the-drive options is sufficient for a machine being given to family. For anything being sold, donated or recycled through a public collection, take the drive out. An old drive makes a perfectly good external disk afterwards.

Take particular care with a machine that held tax returns, scanned identity documents or banking, because those files are often somewhere other than Documents.

On the Windows 11 question

If you’re keeping the old machine as a spare, check whether it can run Windows 11. Windows 10 stopped receiving security updates in October 2025, so a machine that cannot upgrade is one that no longer gets patched.

That’s fine for a device used offline, for old software or as a media player, but not for banking and email, which is what spare family computers often end up used for.