I'm planning on buying a new laptop soon. On my current laptop i have games that i've downloaded from different sites, and a couple have been discontinued or retired so i can't download them any more. What my question is, is how do i upload said games to a flash drive so i can put them on the new laptop? Is that even how i would go about it? I'm not terribly computer literate, but i can follow instructions. I hope i've used the correct terminology, i don't want to sound ignorant. Games are very tricky with migration between systems. If the game is a stand alone game as in it doesnt have integration with the systems registry its an easy migration of those games to another computer. If the game had an installer and was installed and its integrated now to the registry of the old system and you dont have the original installation media, then those games are usually TRAPPED onto the old system with no easy ability to migrate them.

My suggestion is that you might want to keep the old laptop around for PLAYING the old games that are unable to be downloaded and use it as a legacy gaming laptop.

You could locate the games installation folder and copy/paste that data to a large enough USB stick, External Hard Drive, or upload up to 15GB free to Google Cloud storage if you have a gmail account to log onto. Then copy or download that data to the new computer and try to run the executable associated with those games. If the game RUNS then you got lucky and it doesnt have registry hooks that are required to operate. If it gives an error upon trying to make it run its most likely that its missing sections in registry that permit it to operate on a system.Thanks for the suggestion of keeping this laptop for gaming. I never thought of that, and all of my games work fine on this, whereas using it for other things is ONE of the reasons i want to get a new one. And won't that help the new laptop to run better, not having all my games on it? I appreciate your help.