I may have invented something cool!!!

Most ninja computer trick I have ever pulled off in my life tonight is: friend has laptop he got for free and asks me to fix it as a favor....laptop has a bad HDD and a bad cd drive....how to install Windows? Win to flash of course! Make a bootable flash drive to install windows...oh wait, I don't have one big enough....so instead, take the hard drive out of my old Thinkpad t43 and put theirs in it's place and begin to install Windows 7.....allow Windows to install to the point of first restart and cut the power....remove the hard drive from your old Thinkpad and place hard drive into the friends laptop....start laptop....windows 7 now updates registry settings using your friends laptop hardware specifications and finishes installing cleanly......ninja!!

LOL.

Great you worked it out for yourself.

You must work for Apple. I can tell, because you claim to "invent" something that's been around for years!

For your next trick, I'd suggest suing Samsung.

Jeez sorry to disappoint all you guys but I thought it was cool. Sorry I haven't been doing this for years and don't already know every trick in the book.

The next time I feel like sharing what might be a helpful trick I will keep it to myself.

Or, take a moment to see if the "tip" exists already. You might be interested in learning about Sysprep, which was a program Microsoft release long ago that automates a lot of what you just did.

Lol glad it all worked out fine!

Perfect time to add this:

[spoiler] [/spoiler]

Deaconfrost: I just looked at SYSPREP and it seriously would have taken me twice if not three times as long as long as what I did. I literally put a blank HDD into my laptop, then halfway through the install I took it out and put into his (defective CD drive) and it finished installing perfectly. I don't know how much more automated it could get other than building a robot to transfer the drive from one laptop to another. SYSPREP looks cool and would probably be worth the time it takes for installs across multiple systems of the same hardware type. I was just messing around and thought I'd give it a try until I got a bigger USB. Thanks for the tip though.