New
#1
Previous laptop died, do I need to sysprep to move HDD to new machine?
Saturday night I was working on my Windows 8.1 Dell laptop (about 5 years old) when I heard a "pop" from the back of the laptop and it went dark. I'm 99% sure it's the system board. I keep regular backups, but had made some changes to some code (one of my jobs at work is heavy-duty scripting) so wanted to get a more recent backup. I popped the 360 GB SSD out and put it in an older desktop, and after some struggles managed to get it to boot and copy everything to my home server, so I have the most recent backup now.At that point, I knew I was going to be ordering new hardware and decided to just play around a little and install Windows 10 on the old desktop with the laptop HDD (note: the only reason I wasn't already on 10 is the laptop was under warranty until just recently and the vendor didn't support it). To my surprise, the installation took a while but seemed to work perfectly; I could see all my installed apps, and it ran pretty smoothly. So with my new hardware on the way, I wanted to ask this:
Can I just take that HDD out and use it as the boot drive for the new hardware? That would be my preference, as it's got many dozens of programs installed that will take more than a small amount of time to reinstall, plus I'm pretty picky about my OS preferences. This link seems to indicate that I need to make some registry changes before I sysprep, but it also says to just go ahead an pop the new HDD in as Windows 10 is smart enough to just do the driver dance and eventually boot up ok. I don't need to worry about reactivation as it's an Enterprise (MSDN) license.