Transfer system from one laptop to a slightly different model?

I recently bought a refurbished HP laptop, a dv7-4183cl. Overall I thought the laptop was great. However it had a problem (it periodically shut down suddenly, as if it had lost power), and I contacted HP. I was quite surprised that this refurbished laptop had a 6-month support contract.

Unfortunately things did not go well with the repair process. I had to send it in three times, and every time they sent it back, something new was broken. Some of these things I figured out and fixed, but others required sending it in again. Plus every time I moved all my files & work back & forth from the 4183cl to an older laptop, it ate up way too much of my time. Eventually I told HP "This is nuts, I'm not sending it in again."

To my astonishment, they just contacted me and offered me a NEW laptop to replace the faulty refurbished one. Wow! Major kudos to HP.

It's a higher-end model (dv7-6199) -- Core i7 instead of i5, 1TB drive instead of 500GB, 8GB RAM instead of 6. So this seems like a fabulous deal.

My question: I've spent way too much time setting up this laptop -- installing software, customizing, etc. I would *really* rather not have to do that again. If they sent me another dv7-4183cl, I would just take an image backup of my laptop and transfer the image to the new one.

Can I do that from the 4183cl to the 6199? I suspect most OS settings will work OK, and Win7 will probably figure out and fix any drivers/etc that are different. (For example the 6199 has a Radeon graphics processor vs. ATI in the 4183cl.) The bigger disk is my biggest concern. What happens if I restore a 500GB image to a 1TB drive? Can I extend that partition, or would it be better/possible to create a second 500GB partition?

Will I run into licensing issues? Anything else to worry about?

Thanks!
Gary

People on this forum have restored images to new hardware and had it work out OK, although the standard recommendation is to do a fresh install.

I don't think the larger drive will be a factor--you should still be able to extend or manipulate your partitions as needed. You may have to use a third party tool to do it.

Licensing is another issue. I assume you have 2 OEM product keys, one for each laptop? Each of those is supposedly tied to one machine and I don't know if you could use the "new" product key to activate the transferred image from the old laptop.

3rd-party partition tool is no biggie. I have a Linux-based boot CD that will do that. I think I'll create a second partition so the C: drive doesn't get so enormous.

I'm hoping that the licensing subsystem will complain because it has old-key on the new laptop, but if I give it new-key it'll be happy?

garyfritz said:

I'm hoping that the licensing subsystem will complain because it has old-key on the new laptop, but if I give it new-key it'll be happy?

It's worth a try. I don't know how it will work out.

But--when an image is restored, it is typically already activated---if the machine from which the image was made was activated at the time the image was made. That might through a wrench into the works.

OK. I won't get it for a couple of weeks (I'll be out of town) but I'll try to remember to update the board with the results. Tnx!

Finally got the new laptop last week, and I decided to bite the bullet and set it up properly. So I didn't experiment with restoring the smaller-disk image.