Swapping Hard Drives

[Elphnt]

Hi people, here's the situation: I have two seemingly similar desktops (same model number). The hard drive on the newer of the two computers simply stopped working and there doesn't seem to be any workaround to it. I was thinking of taking the hard drive from the older one and putting it in the other computer, which will essentially give me a newer computer. Are there likely to be any problems? I should mention that I intend to move the bootable drive.

[DunePilot]

You could, but it sounds like a great time to upgrade to a SSD and Win10 to me.

[Elphnt]

Here's the thing. The reason why I said that they were seemingly similar is because while mine cannot upgrade to Win 10, the other one can.

[DunePilot]

If you don't mind a clean install you can put Win10 on the new one as long as you have a $10 USB stick.

Not registering doesn't keep you from doing much of anything... I have two that I never even bothered to pay to register.

http://www.windowscentral.com/you-do-not-need-activate-windows-10

[Elphnt]

I will try to do that. But I am still really interested in knowing if a simple hard-drive swap will lead to any problems.

[DunePilot]

Clean installs are recommended but Win10 is pretty good about figuring out new hardware, and after an update or two and a reboot or two it usually runs fairly smooth and issue free. Still I can't and don't recommend it and prefer clean installs, and never a better time than now to upgrade to an SSD as well. GL