Swapping hdd and patches

My laptop died after spilling coffee on it. I have a brand new same model laptop and swapped my hdd from old to new. Powered it up and seems to works perfect. Went to shut down for a fresh reboot and it is installing 53 updates. Is this just bad timing (I'm waiting for the updates to complete so I can do more validation that the hdd swap worked without any issues). I was concerned that the hdd my be tied to the old laptop and not work in the new one. It appears to be working but now I'm adding a lot of changes (53 patches) right when I wanted to confirm everything was stable after the hdd swap.

So are patches tied to the hardware and because I swapped hdd I have a lot of patches that need to be reinstalled or is it just my luck of bad timing and Msft released a bunch of updates recently right when I had to swap my hdd? I always though patches were SW only but seems like too much of a coincidence.

Thanks

Correct, I just pulled the HDD out of the old laptop and stuck it in the new one. However I'm starting to have some doubts. When I powered up the new laptop with the old HDD for the first time it came right up. I opened my email as well. Then I figured I'd reboot it. It's been installing the 53 patches for almost 1.5hrs. I'm now booting up (after about an hour of installing patches on shutdown) and have been waiting about a half hour while patches continue to get installed on boot - I'm at about 10% obviously moving very slow. I'm starting to wonder if the long time it's taking to install the patches is an indication that I cannot do what I did, swap HDD's. The old and new laptops are both Lenovo T430s.

The installation completed, rebooted and then started up again. Moving very slow. I gave up. I put the original SSD that came with the new laptop running Win7 back in and resync'd my box.com files, setup outlook and mounted my old SSD via a USB cable to transfer over any local files that were not on box. Currently cloning my new SSD (120GB) to my old SSD (240GB) with Acronis. Once that's done I'll swap the SSD's again and should be ready to roll. I've never seen updates take so long to install. Especially when the SSD was running yesterday on a system kept current so I can't imagine why 53 updates coincidentally were required when I did the drive swap. I guess I'll never know for sure but maybe it was related to an activation problem. I appreciate the quick responses this is a great forum.