Windows 10 can swallow total hardware change?

I have avoided most versions of Windows. I recall with older versions,
if you took a Windows hard drive and plugged it in to a different PC,
it would faff about detecting new hardware, and then either BSOD or
complain too much hardware had changed, so require re-activation.

Now I found a PC in a dumpster that wouldn't boot. It had an SSD,
so I plugged that in to an old PC ... and it displayed something
about setting up 25% then 75% then starts up (the previous user had
not required a password). Well, strike me down with a feather.
The junk PC was a Haswell, and test mule a Nehalem. Probably
nothing was the same.

It was as if I had swapped a linux installation disk.

On 25/11/2017 7:07 PM, wrote:
I have avoided most versions of Windows. I recall with older versions,
if you took a Windows hard drive and plugged it in to a different PC,
it would faff about detecting new hardware, and then either BSOD or
complain too much hardware had changed, so require re-activation.

Now I found a PC in a dumpster that wouldn't boot. It had an SSD,
so I plugged that in to an old PC ... and it displayed something
about setting up 25% then 75% then starts up (the previous user had
not required a password). Well, strike me down with a feather.
The junk PC was a Haswell, and test mule a Nehalem. Probably
nothing was the same.

It was as if I had swapped a linux installation disk.

There's a lot of old outdated "common knowledge" about Windows that
haven't been true for a long time. I've seen at least since the XP days
that Windows can easily be swapped into new hardware and it will find
and load all of the proper hardware drivers for it. Maybe pre-XP days
that was a little different, let's say in the Windows 95/98/ME days. But
all of the NT-based Windows operating systems were fairly robust about
hardware changes, and wouldn't BSOD. It would load most common drivers
in properly, and then later you could go and find updated drivers on the
Net.

Even reactivation is not a bad thing, the Windows would still work,
while unactivated, and just a few minor features wouldn't work. Plus,
the reactivation was hardly a Gestapo-style interrogation, Microsoft
would almost always allow a reactivation to go through, without much
question.

Yousuf Khan


--
Sent from Giganews on Thunderbird on my Toshiba laptop

wrote:
I have avoided most versions of Windows. I recall with older versions,
if you took a Windows hard drive and plugged it in to a different PC,
it would faff about detecting new hardware, and then either BSOD or
complain too much hardware had changed, so require re-activation.

Now I found a PC in a dumpster that wouldn't boot. It had an SSD,
so I plugged that in to an old PC ... and it displayed something
about setting up 25% then 75% then starts up (the previous user had
not required a password). Well, strike me down with a feather.
The junk PC was a Haswell, and test mule a Nehalem. Probably
nothing was the same.

It was as if I had swapped a linux installation disk.



The disk could have been Sysprep'ed, but I'm not
an IT guy and don't know how to do that. You can check
the appearance here, of what a startup after sysprep
looks like.

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...-computer.html

The Windows 10 one apparently shows "Getting Ready".

https://www.petri.com/using-syspre-windows-10

And Windows does have the ability now to be promiscuous.
But I don't know if this is really practical. This has
been hacked to work on home user SKUs. Your OS stays
on a USB stick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_To_Go

Paul

On Sat, 25 Nov 2017 05:07:15 -0800 (PST), wrote:

I have avoided most versions of Windows. I recall with older versions,
if you took a Windows hard drive and plugged it in to a different PC,
it would faff about detecting new hardware, and then either BSOD or
complain too much hardware had changed, so require re-activation.

Now I found a PC in a dumpster that wouldn't boot. It had an SSD,
so I plugged that in to an old PC ... and it displayed something
about setting up 25% then 75% then starts up (the previous user had
not required a password). Well, strike me down with a feather.
The junk PC was a Haswell, and test mule a Nehalem. Probably
nothing was the same.

It was as if I had swapped a linux installation disk.

That would be Windows 8 and 10. Windows XP/SP3 is marginally less
complicated, a lot less than an actual validity to Windows 7,
certainly more so to a proposed transmigration, depending on what is
expected from a platform for programs and a degree of disparate
resource-intensiveness involved.

Pre-existing definitions in the registry or hardware detection phase
may conflict, perhaps irrevocably, as you've noticed. But there are
some whom mention having removed them prior, clearing out for
migrating the registry in preparation. My personal experience is from
being built from a generic hardware platform, where the
"pre-installation" has a distinct possibility of adapting successfully
to another build lacking further technological or unique constraints.

Two Gigabyte MBs separated by 5 or 10 years manufacture dates, for
instance. . .A quadcore to an octalcore, in my experience, which XP3
managed. More or less. I've still more a resulting issue, a slight
upon a mere curiosity, for expunging the Frankenstein and rebuilding
the entire driver sequencing with a fresh XP3 install.