The original DOS product, LapLink itself, was a godsend for moving files between computers without the need for floppies—some files wouldn't even fit and few systems were network-connected at the time. It was subsequently obviated by FileLink and INTERLNK on DRDOS 5 / MSDOS 6. Neither was quite as good but served the purpose. In the early Windows era, Traveling Software offered LapLink for Windows which had both remote control and file transfer capabilities. It was all high quality software.
I haven't used PCmover, the current product offered by LapLink Software Inc., since I no longer have Windows machines to which it applies and when I did, networking was a thing. It's not clear to me that the current form of LapLink Software is Traveling Software in anything but name. As software increases in complexity it becomes harder to make well. A 200K DOS utility, or a file transfer system fits on an option ROM (or resident in 5K of RAM!), isn't necessarily easy to make at all — and would be considered highly complex compared to what was available on systems just a few years prior — but it's easier to get right. Something that implements a modern GUI, networking, and system-level tasks is no mean feat. It doesn't surprise me that experiences with the current product are... uneven. Moving an entire OS and all user data from one device to another is a hard problem to crack particularly with the constraints that Windows imposes. In any case, when I first learned of TS-DOS, which was recently as such things go, I was surprised to find it was the "laplink guys." It makes a certain amount of sense, though: A M100 DOS is really a file transfer program between a system and a peer device that just so happens to have a floppy drive in it. Or, in the modern case, terabytes of disk space. As far as I'm aware TS-DOS itself takes advantage none of the sector access stuff that the Brother drives offer. And its most useful (to me) aspect is less as a TUI file transfer program but as a driver that implements the 0: device. Which it does very well! This is kind of an interesting exercise in software lineage, though: Traveling Software's TS-DOS transferred files between serial-connected computers (one of which was a Brother drive). Their LapLink more or less invented the parallel port data transfer for DOS-based PC and still offered serial transfers. Digital Research, which originally offered CP/M and then subsequently a DOS-compatible OS, reimplemented z client/server version of it as a built in tool. Microsoft then produced the INTERLNK software which worked similarly but had the client/server architecture and virtual disk device drivers. Modern DOS such as FreeDOS can still run LapLink, INTERLNK, and FileLink although parallel ports are few and far between. The best option for compatibility, as always, is a serial port. It's a long journey from point A to point B.
