Suppose I wish to upgrade to new PC hardware (including SSD, USB 3.0, etc.) while retaining all current software (including Win7 Pro). Is this easy? Possible?
What I’m imagining is the purchase of a “bare” PC (i.e. one with no software installed) and some sort of HDD “transfusion” from old to new machine. But presumably I’d need drivers specific to some of the new hardware items, which looks like a troublesome complication.
It’s possible, and you could always give it a shot. It’s not like cloning the partition will take more than an hour or so. If it boots and you don’t see any stability issues. You’re golden. If you start running into issues and it’s difficult to track down the source, well then you can wipe everything and re-install.
Cloning your partition to run on your new PC might have you running into issues with drivers and an incompatible HAL install.
If you own a license for your Windows 7 Pro and all of your other software, you can just buy or build a new PC and re-install everything, starting with a fresh install of Win7.
That might be hard to trouble shoot too, because now you don’t know if the issue is a bad piece of hardware, a driver, which driver, or some other issue cause by missing/new hardware.
It can go really easy, or it can go really bad. Which is why I would suggest re-installing everything as the more time consuming, but less stressful way of doing it. Again, you probably won’t lose too much time trying a clone first though.
IF you old machine has SATA ports, you could test drive it by just plugging the old drive in and see if it will boot.
As **Kinthalis[/b} pointed out, it is possible to rebuild the drivers and migrate a machine the way you propose, but it is rarely clean.
Windows is going to be your biggest problem. If I’m not mistaken (I build all my own machines (except laptops), so don’t have much direct experience), installs of Windows are tied to the machine itself. So functionality aside, when Windows wakes up in new hardware and tries to re-authorize itself it’ll fail because it’s no longer on that Brand X hardware anymore.
If on the other hand you have a retail/OEM copy of Windows, consider doing the following:
That was also way oversimplified, but it’s not all that much more complicated. Details depend on the new hardware and again, what kind of license you have with Windows in the first place. You might only need a copy of Windows.
BTW, I’m actually going through something very similar right now—I’m swapping a SSD for a HDD in a 2009 HP laptop.
I should start with a bare drive and reinstall Windows from the recovery disks and everything else from their disks.
But what a pain in the ass. Not only the reinstalls, but the enormous amount of customization.
Anyone know if there’s a helper program (free or paid) that will not only tell you what software you have (that’s easy), but will also help transfer settings? Something like FEBE but system-wide. Heck, I’d be happy with just Office and Adobe suites transferring over with super points for transferring Windows customizations (e.g. folder views).
If not, any experience doing the in-place install with a non-vendor disk? That is, I own several OEM licenses and have the associated disks. I own (for lack of a better word) the HP’s Windows install. I can’t use their recovery disks to do the in-place install, but can I use one of my others? Or will I likely run into reactivation issues?
You can transplant the HDD and Windows will reconfigure itself for the new hardware. You’ll need the driver disk that comes with the motherboard. (Top tip: copy the whole CD to a folder on the HDD beforehand.) You’ll likely need many reboots. Unfortunately, you mentioned that you’re getting a SSD. Windows sets things up specially when installed on a SSD - it won’t defragment the SSD, and it will enable TRIM support, and a few other things - but it has to actually be installed from scratch on the SSD.
What I suggest you do is get your new PC, then install Windows and your applications, but do not activate them. Then fire up your old PC, link the two with network cables via your router, and use Windows Easy Transfer to migrate your settings and data. Once you’re happy you’ve got everything across, shut down the old PC,then activate Windows, Office, etc. You’ll likely have to ring MS, but they’ve almost always been helpful to me.
Use Windows Easy Transfer to copy all your data and settings to an external HDD, reinstall Windows and apps on the SSD, use Windows Easy Transfer to restore your settings and data.
[quote=“Quartz, post:7, topic:669660”]
Use Windows Easy Transfer /QUOTE]
:smack:
Thanks. I can’t believe I forgot about that. I’ve always done a clean install so have limited experience with it. Now off to find out how comprehensive it is…
Its not that big of a deal actually we move OEM licences to new hardware during repairs all the time.
Right–I took a new OEM disk that was never installed, I could install it on the HP machine and have no problem. But I want to use an OEM disk to reinstall on the HP machine an then use the HP activation.
I don’t want to move the licenses around, and I don’t want to end up with more than two legal/licensed machines.
The hook is that I want to use the OEM disk to do the in-place install (IIRC, 64-bit Windows DVDs have all flavours of the OS) and then somehow use the HP activation key.
My question stems from my understanding of a different situation—that if I built a new desktop and wanted to get rid of the laptop, I’d run into activation issues using the HP disks or activation code on a new desktop. Even though the total number of computers running Windows stays at one, the original license was for running it on the laptop only.
ETA: A way around this would be to just experiment, but since these would be such large write operations, I’m hesitant to do that with the new SSD. That is, if things go awry, I’ll be over-writing 80 percent of a 240-GB drive three or four times. Back when SSDs were coming out, I thought it was bad form to do that; have things changed (or was I wrong about the fatigue)?
The HP key should work with the OEM disk. Don’t worry about experimenting WRT writing so much to the SSD: you’ll only be writing less than a tenth of what you expect before you have to put in the license key.
There is a way to reinstall the OEM activation/keys like the OEM preinstall kit uses, but it is not for the non-techy and I am hesitant to advertise because they technique could be used to pirate windows en masse and I would prefer that microsoft not go out of their way to close this technique as it is how we save folks with damaged key stickers without forcing them to buy a new copy of windows.
Seconded, the key on the sticker is an OEM key. Any OEM windows disk for the proper version of windows should happily accept it.