Transfer system from one laptop to a slightly different model?

[garyfritz]

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

 

[ignatzatsonic]

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.

 

[garyfritz]

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?

 

[ignatzatsonic]

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.

 

[garyfritz]

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!

 

[garyfritz]

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.