I would just plug it in and see if it is ok.
If not, hit it with an adaptive restore program - Paragon do the best one- does a perfect job in a couple of seconds..
There used to be a version around for free, but I haven't seen that in a while.
It is included as a feature in most of their paid products.
I did by hand once - someone posted their system hive and I adjusted it - bit fiddly, but it can be done
Ok so an update guys as I had chance to stick my build together over the weekend - then power went off down my street and they had to dig up the cable for a temp. fix so had to test the thing out last night :S Anyway, I basically decided to give a go to keeping my install intact, and if worst came to worst I'd just reinstall. So I uninstalled all the drivers I could find associated with my old hardware, ran ccleaner and then hit it with sysprep. I then dismounted from the old machine, hooked it up to the new one and hit the power button with fingers crossed!
Everything booted fine as if it was a new install with it applying drivers, etc. and then asking for a computer name and the Win7 code.
So far everything seems to be ok, I did get a couple of errors when trying to install the USB 3.0 drivers for my motherboard but the ports seem to vbe working ok. Having added a few extra programs I'm now over 50% full on my 120GB SSD so I'm considering upgrading to a 256GB drive like a Crucial m4 or Samsung 830 but that might be a few months off.
So hopefully you can put me down as having used sysprep and made it out to the other side in one piece, thanks again for your help :)
Windows 7 has not failed to boot up on us with multiple mobo/CPU swaps so far.
They really made it very resilient.
I've done 2 swaps so far on my original os install from August of 2009.
Q6600 setup originally to an i7 870, and then to my i7 2600k.
All were intel.
My brother recently did his going from an AMD 1090T x6 to an i7 2600k, just had to change the controller from ahci to IDE, booted up, found the new hardware rebooted and was good to go.
I've done it a few other times on customer machines when the mobo failed, and they booted up and worked fine after windows installed the new drivers.
Sounds like you've been very lucky. There are equally frequent reports of it stalling at boot animation after a change of machines - a convergence of drivers, HID and SID conflicting requiring them to be removed from the install or have it SysPrepped first.
XP requires an XP Repair Install to adjust to new hardware, which conveniently can be done from boot.
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