Best way to move software/windows to new hardware?

[kalniel]

So I'm finally upgrading the old beast. My original windows 7 pro license was retail, thus when I got a free windows 10 update it was installed ontop and the license can be transferred to replacement hardware.

I'm only replacing CPU/mobo/ram - hard drives and everything else are carried over.

So what's going to be involved on the software side to do the move? It's quite a significant change of hardware, so I don't know if I can just plug in the hard drive and see what happens, or should I do a fresh install and try and activate the license again on the new hardware? Any other options?

I'm loathe to do a fresh install simply because I have bits and pieces across several hard drive volumes and I don't know how well things like MS store will cope - and meager broadband speeds mean I don't particularly want to download 100+gb of game files again.

[Jonj1611]

I would just transfer the drives over and see how you get on

[stevie lee]

what I did when swapping from my old cpu and mobo, uninstall all motherboard specific software/drivers. like sound/network/chipset.
did that to minimise conflicts and potential BSODs if incorrect drivers tried to run stuff.

then plugged in drive to new computer.

it spent a while loading up windows and doing windows update and reconfiguring itself. all still works.

I'm also on a win 7 retail upgraded to win 10 digital licence.

[kalniel]

what I did when swapping from my old cpu and mobo, uninstall all motherboard specific software/drivers. like sound/network/chipset.
did that to minimise conflicts and potential BSODs if incorrect drivers tried to run stuff.

Good plan. Did any of those uninstalls require a reboot? If so, did you reboot in the old computer or did you leave them hanging for the new one?

[Hoonigan]

Windows 10 is very good at adapting to new hardware these days. It'll take a few minutes while it sorts itself out but you might find you're absolutely fine. I've only ever had an issue with AMD Ryzen Master being a pain in the neck when trying to boot a system with an Intel CPU while the Ryzen Master was trying to launch services.

[stevie lee]

Good plan. Did any of those uninstalls require a reboot? If so, did you reboot in the old computer or did you leave them hanging for the new one?

left it hanging. or else it would just've bunged the drivers back on again for old stuff.

if theres an option for 'restart later' do that.

[DanceswithUnix]

I usually take an image of the boot drive before doing the upgrade. With the current low price of SSDs I have bought a new SSD to clone the old boot drive onto giving me an easy backing out path and a hardware upgrade for the new PC.

Windows 10 seems much better than previous versions at coping with hardware changes. Not perfect mind, I now have the option to eject various bits of hardware including my video card on the Windows pluggable devices control. Yes I have tried it out of curiosity, and yes I did have to press the reset button to get the machine back. Usually it just works though.

[kalniel]

I usually take an image of the boot drive before doing the upgrade. With the current low price of SSDs I have bought a new SSD to clone the old boot drive onto giving me an easy backing out path and a hardware upgrade for the new PC.

Not a bad idea, especially if not using an SSD already. My boot drive is an SSD, so while one day I'll switch to a fast one, it's not going to be a noticeable upgrade to get a faster one. On the other hand, I do image to a £20 USB stick for the backing out path which isn't as swappable as a complete hard drive, granted, but helps a bit.

[DanceswithUnix]

Not a bad idea, especially if not using an SSD already. My boot drive is an SSD, so while one day I'll switch to a fast one, it's not going to be a noticeable upgrade to get a faster one. On the other hand, I do image to a £20 USB stick for the backing out path which isn't as swappable as a complete hard drive, granted, but helps a bit.

So far it has been HDD to SSD conversion, or a doubling in capacity (or more) of the SSD as there were some old 250GB drives kicking around. Have yet to go NVMe.

[kalniel]

So for reference it was as super easy as the posters above suggested.. apart from activation.

The bootup in the new system took no longer than applying a normal windows update, it really was very fast, and everything worked from the start which was impressive.

However windows did de-activate itself in the process. Attempting activation failed with 'oops, something went wrong, try later' helpful error. Windows support just directed me to the windows 10 store to buy a license :/

But luckily I still had my windows 7 pro box and key, and somewhere along the line a pop up to enter key came up and it accepted the windows 7 key fine and activated my 10 pro.

In terms of performance, going from a top end 9-years ago computer to top end today, I'm getting roughly 2.5x faster performance in pure CPU and storage benchmarks/limited tasks. The CPU I was expecting, the storage benchmark I was not since I carried storage over (fairly old SSD was apparently limited by interface/chipset/RAM cache before - I've gone from ~3000MB/s peak to ~7500MB/s). All of which has done barely a thing for the general user experience - windows and application load times feel exactly the same so there was nothing wrong with the old setup there But of course, compute tasks finish in about half the time. Gaming feels pretty much identical because I was refresh rate/GPU limited for the most part, responsiveness has increased just a touch, which is just about noticeable in Forza in terms of controller response and physics calculations seem to be sped up as debris now scatter faster (there was a bit of a slowed motion effect of the debris before which I assumed was for style reasons but turns out it might have been physics limited!)

In terms of doing the upgrade.. I've got more stressed in my old age. Time was when I would have loved pulled apart a computer and rebuilding it. This time all I could think about was whether it was going to fail..

[DanceswithUnix]

In terms of doing the upgrade.. I've got more stressed in my old age. Time was when I would have loved pulled apart a computer and rebuilding it. This time all I could think about was whether it was going to fail..

Hence I do the cloning thing onto a new SSD.

Mind you a recent upgrade I did was a new GPU in my son's PC. That is a workstation Xeon based machine, I was using a SATA to PCIe power adaptor for the GPU power feed which annoyingly caused the PSU to shut down at a bad time causing the SSD to trash some of the contents so it would no longer boot into Windows. It was just a simple GPU upgrade, what could go wrong... Thankfully he didn't lose much in the reformat and install.