Can I drop hard drive into a new laptop?

Hi all,

I am running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit on an ageing laptop, with cooling problems. So I want a new laptop.

However the original disk drive is a 1TB SSD so I don't want to waste it,; plus I don't fancy re-installing all my software and moving all my data manually to the new laptop!

So can I simply take out the original 1TB SSD, drop it into the new laptop, and let Windows on the drive auto-detect the new hardware evironment? Is this strategy likely to work without causing major problems?

And would it help to upgrade to Win 10 before doing the hard drive move?

Thanks!

OK - if it all goes wrong then, can I put it back in the old laptop and carry on, or will that cause issues?

SIW2 said:

You can either sysprep

Dare I ask, what is sysprep?

You can put it back into the old laptop. But you need to find out why your laptop is overheating. If it's simply a matter of too much dust in the computer, that can pretty easily be fixed. But if you have a bad video circuit or if some other built-in circuit is bad, your motherboard will need to be replaced. In that case, it would be better to get a new laptop than to try to fix the old one.

Sysprep very simply sets Windows up to run a mini install to find new drivers and hardware

- As @townsbg mentioned, if the Win 7 copy isn't retail type, it won't activate.
- You have to set BIOS properly. Disable fast boot and Secure boot.
- If your Win 7 SSD is Legacy - MBR you must set Legacy boot.
- New computers require new drivers (specially USB3.x and SATA) so, if you able to boot, you won't have USB and you wont see the drive.

If you have over temperature on your Laptop, why don't you open and clean it?