Thread: What would happen, if I put my Hard Drive that has Windows 7, onto an older computer?

Windows Vista had a security measure that would stop the OS from working, if significant hardware parts got changed out. I'm not sure if Windows 7 has the same though.

Nothing would happen. It would work just the same. The OS has nothing to do with the computer make, but rather the hard-drive itself. Your real problem is finding the right adapters.

At first I was going to reply just like CXIV did without even thinking about it. Which is apparently a mistake, because windows 7 has some pretty high requirements to run. Apparently you need 1 or 2 gigs of ram to run it, depending on if you are using 32 or 64 bit. Compared to Xp which only required 128 megabytes of ram. However, you meet that requirement, so it shouldn't be an issue.

As for it being safe, your not going to cause any damage to anything by putting it in. Worse case scenario is that the computer just wont start. So if you feel comfortable taking them apart, go ahead and give it a try.

Originally Posted by Alric

At first I was going to reply just like CXIV did without even thinking about it.

Lol.


Give it a shot and tell us what happens, but my prediction is that it'll throw errors right out of the BIOS. I've never tried this before, but I find it reasonable to predict that your experience will not be identical to that of your old computer. The hardware has changed significantly, and unless you give us details on the make and model of the motherboards, graphics cards, etc. of both machines, we can't tell you much beyond that.

Yeah, I'd be shocked if MS hadn't done something to prevent you from doing that. I think part of their registration process includes looking at hardware serial numbers or somesuch. Not sure what they do, cause they DO need to support people upgrading their hardware.

This is an interesting question: They want to ensure that you can only install it on one computer, but how much upgrading/changing is needed for that computer to be considered "not the same computer"? I mean, I could replace a fried motherboard and a broken hard drive, and I'd expect it to still work when I re-install on the replacement parts...

Assuming it does manage to run, I'd say it would crawl pretty horribly.

Jorge: Can you get us more specs on both machines?

Replicon: I doubt that it would crawl unless the new processor was less than 1GHz - at worst (assuming it does boot and let you into the OS at all), it would require a whole slew of drivers to be installed - and if 7 handles missing drivers anything like Vista did for me, it'll throw a sizable list at you of those missing drivers.

As my understanding of Windows goes you may be able to swap it but you'll then have to run a repair installation to update the drivers etc. I haven't tried it with Win 7 though.

Win 7 x86 or Win 7 x64? One might work fine, the other won't boot

Ooh, didn't consider the x86/x64 difference.... 'Course, he's basically abandoned us right when we were all about to learn something new and cool about computers, so....

I switched hard drives in computers before. They were computers built like 5 or 6 years apart from each other, but it worked fine. Though for some reason windows started to think that it was a counterfeit version of windows instead of a real version after I did that. That was on windows xp though.