rohan
July 4th, 2010, 01:42
Recently, I've been thinking about buying a new PC, and a thought occurred to me about installing Win7. How easy is it to move the Win7 system drive from the old PC to the new one ?
By that, I mean shut down the old PC, physically move the drive to the new one and just reboot it. Given that the old PC has one type of motherboard and processor (say an 1156 socket) and the new one has a different type (say a 1366 socket), would Win7 work like that ? Or are there elements of the Win7 install that are keyed to the specific processor / motherboard / BIOS of the system on which it was installed ?
I have my doubts whether this would work if the move was from an AMD processor to an Intel one (or vice versa), but I couldn't work out whether it would work if the move was from 1156 to 1366.
Similarly, what is the situation with the "registry" ? I believe that this contains entries specific to the hardware platform on which it was installed which prevent a registry file from simply being copied over to a new platform.
The reason for these questions stems from what I think I know about system-builders. As I understand it, they have cloning software which allows them to "copy" an install from their set of builds on to a newly built system, then make a few "simple" tweaks (like changing the network MAC address) and they have a complete ready-to-test system.
Thanks in advance for any insight,
regards,
Ro
By that, I mean shut down the old PC, physically move the drive to the new one and just reboot it. Given that the old PC has one type of motherboard and processor (say an 1156 socket) and the new one has a different type (say a 1366 socket), would Win7 work like that ? Or are there elements of the Win7 install that are keyed to the specific processor / motherboard / BIOS of the system on which it was installed ?
I have my doubts whether this would work if the move was from an AMD processor to an Intel one (or vice versa), but I couldn't work out whether it would work if the move was from 1156 to 1366.
Similarly, what is the situation with the "registry" ? I believe that this contains entries specific to the hardware platform on which it was installed which prevent a registry file from simply being copied over to a new platform.
The reason for these questions stems from what I think I know about system-builders. As I understand it, they have cloning software which allows them to "copy" an install from their set of builds on to a newly built system, then make a few "simple" tweaks (like changing the network MAC address) and they have a complete ready-to-test system.
Thanks in advance for any insight,
regards,
Ro