question for my new computer

FATAZIAN · July 30, 2016

I'm building a new computer, can i just plug my old hard drive that already has windows into my new computer?

And can you move windows that is on my hard drive to an ssd without restoring?

Zone00roxX · July 30, 2016

depends on your new hardware, if just GPU (you just need to reinstall the new GPU driver) or RAM, they will be fine, but if it's your motherboard or processor, unfortunately you can't, because already installed windows on your old pc will have a different chipset and etc installed with your new rig, so it will be wise to clean install your os

Mark77 · July 30, 2016

Windows 10 is amazingly tolerant of hardware changes. Amazingly. I've done straight swaps of SSDs from PC's running Windows 10 with Nvidia chipsets and AMD CPU's to Intel Sandy/Ivy/Haswell hardware. It takes a bit longer at bootup, but Windows sorts it out.

Make sure you do proper backups, of course, but chances are *very* good that you can just swap your boot drive from your old machine to your new machine without much fuss.

As far as moving a HDD to a SSD, there's software available to do that. Its often not optimal, especially if you're moving from an old BIOS/MBR setup, but its not the end of the world if you have to use MBR compatibility mode on a UEFI-supporting board.