I have promised to upgrade a friends old XP machine to Win7 on a larger spare HD. Can I format that HD on one of my PCs and install Windows7 etc and then take it down to him and plug it in? Would save a lot of my time, but wondered if it will work if not installed on the actual pc that it is going to be run on?
Thanks for any advice
Mike
You'd need to SysPrep to move HD to another computer
As an alternative, I suggest installing Win7 from a USB flash drive on your friend's PC. That's much quicker than using the DVD.
That assumes that all that you plan to give your friend is a Windows installation. Most of the setup time on the upgraded machine would be downloading and installing WIndows updates, plus installing and configuring all of the applications. (It's not permitted to do an upgrade-in-place from XP to Win7.)
Quote