Windows 10: Best Way to Build A New Win10 Machine.

Windows could be preinstalled on a HDD. The setup wouldn't happen until the drive was installed and the computer started. It would cost more than a dollar or two. I've had success swapping my SSD from a computer that died to a new computer and everything including activation work the first time. This was a full install retail version. What does 2017 have to do with installing the OS on a HDD? Last time I tried it still works. One thing I would recommend is that when installing use a local account and switch to a MS account after the OS is installed. This way you will be able to use your name for username and not the first five letters of your email address.

 

Hmmm. Then what about what NavyLCDR says about this 'sysprep/generalize' thing, I wonder?

I could sure use a method to transfer. I got a free upgrade on an old machine with a D945 motherboard running win7 back when they were doing that.

It'd be great if I could get if off there and onto a more modern motherboard.

My googling only pointed me towards phone contacts with MS and pitching them the story and relying on finding a friendly operator.... Not very hopeful. I didn't even try.

These two ideas seem much more hopeful. sysprep or, as you say, just try it with version/download or otherwise of win10? It was win10?

And I wonder when/how would you issue the sysprep command?

 

You can`t legally take it off another machine. You can only do that if your Windows 7 install was retail.

You`ll have to buy Windows 10 *Smile

But I`ve also read if you have a Microsoft account it could be activated that way.

Brink would know much more on the subject, he`s the man you want to talk to.

Microsoft Account - Link to Digital License on Windows 10 PC

Sysprep

Google

You also asked about the size of the SSD, in my opinion a 250 to 256 GB ssd is fine, others will say larger is better, it all comes down to money and how much you wanna spend.

Access Denied

 

I'd rather spend nothing.
I have a 150G and you've confirmed my thought that it's not really big enough.
I don't want to get caught with a too small system disk, I've had that hassle before.
Thinking of that: what's the size of a 1T disk?
I mean: what's it measured in?
8 bit bytes?
So if I install 64 bit win10 I've got effectively only 250G from a 1T drive?
Or that's not quite true because the OS is clever enough to pack the 64 bit word with two (or more?) chars, etc.?

In short: do we lose any space on a hard drive by using 64 bit systems?

 

A 1 TB drive is 931 GB in windows.

 

Installing an OS to a HDD still works perfectly well. Its just slow compared to having it installed on a SSD. That said, my Dell Precision laptop has a 128GB mSATA SSD as a main drive and a 1TB Seagate FireCuda SSHD as a data drive. My desktop has both as HDDs. My laptop is used for work where as my desktop is just used for liesure and gaming, so boot and load speeds arent as crucial. A lot of it just depends on if you are okay with having slower boot and load time for programs. If you are more concerned about space than speed, HDDs are still viable as they are still far cheaper for the same amount of storage than an SSD.

I personally dont see HDDs going away for a good while yet.

 

Windows 10 is much more forgiving moving between computers than even Microsoft says. I've moved two hard drives with Windows 10 between different computers due to upgrades and repairs and neither one had any problem at all, without even doing the sysprep command. You get a delay in the first boot on the new system and it says something like install new devices on the screen for a few minutes and then just boots up on the new system like nothing happened. Except, that if that version of Windows 10 (Home or Pro) was not on that computer before, it will deactivate itself and you have to enter a valid product key to reactivate it. My computers all have licenses for Windows 10 Pro, so my Windows just stayed activated moving between the computers.

There are two major hardware differences that will, for sure, interfere with just moving the entire hard drive over (either physically, or by cloning it). One is legacy BIOS v. UEFI. To switch between a legacy BIOS computer and a UEFI computer it's easiest to just do a clean install on the new computer and then copy over only the OS (C: drive) partition - replacing the newly installed OS partition with the old OS partition. Then you have to do a quick repair of the boot files.

The other show stopper is if the drive controllers are different types or in different modes. Moving from a SATA controller to an SSD on an M.2 interface, or moving from a SATA controller in IDE mode to a SATA controller in AHCI mode as examples. This can be fixed by booting the old computer into safe mode and deleting the disk controller from device manager first. Shut down. Move the OS over to the new computer, then boot up.

But you do have to have a legitimate way of activating Windows 10 once it is moved/copied over.