Does this work these days? Want to take the SSD from an old laptop to a new desktop. Of course it’l throw a wobbly with regards drivers etc, but it should sort itself out I’d imagine. Question is, will there be problems with activation etc? It’s W10.

If that hard drive is the one which your OS is installed on, then yes you’ll need to reactivate windows. Ideally you should format the hard drive and reinstall the OS from scratch, but you can sometimes get away with not doing that.

It’ll need reactivation because the key is tied to the motherboard that was in the pc when it was activated last time.

That ^^ pretty much.

Windows has got steadily more robust over the years with this sort of thing. I’d probably be wary of changing CPU architecture (Intel <-> AMD) and maybe consider removing the old video card drivers first if you’ve got third party ones installed. Other than that you’re probably OK.

And yes, it’ll need re-activating. Activation is tied to an ID string in the BIOS/UEFI.

Ok but will re-activation work?

If it’s an OEM license I believe that it is tied to the BIOS and technically won’t activate on new hardware; however (you might be able to get around this using the automated telephone activation service if this still exists.

However unless things have changed, retail versions can be freely transferred. The license for my retail copy of Windows 8 Pro (updated to W10 Pro) is tied to my Microsoft account; when I replaced the motherboard and processor it reactivated without complaint.

On the flip side – I’m planning on sticking a new SDD in my PC, and getting rid of the tiny one that’s in there now. Can I just reinstall Windows on the fresh one with my MS account? I’m not sure whether my Windows is OEM or retail tbh.

On the flip side – I’m planning on sticking a new SDD in my PC, and getting rid of the tiny one that’s in there now. Can I just reinstall Windows on the fresh one with my MS account? I’m not sure whether my Windows is OEM or retail tbh.

There’s a good chance that the SSD will come with mirroring software (the Samsung I bought years ago did and its mirroring software worked flawlessly). If you leave the old SSD in place initially you should be able to mirror it to the new drive without need to reinstall anything.

Ah that’s cool, might go with that. Though I always used to like to reinstall Windows, is that still worthwhile or is it a bit more efficient now?

I did almost exactly that recently, except I formatted the SSD and created partitions on an old PC.

Installed Windows 10 from a USB stick (files available from the Microsoft website).

Bought a licence key from eBay for £1.40.

Transfered all the data via second SSD (I have a small mountain of old laptop ssd’s after doing the WEE sorting for an office, really should eBay them) and £2.99 usb3-eSATA cable.

You probably can do it all with one drive, just create a partition for the new windows install. Then once that’s done, copy across all the old files you need to a new partition before deleting the old one. I just figured it was easier to start from scratch.

retail versions can be freely transferred

For the full version, yes. There are also cheaper retail licenses for home-built PCs that are locked to that specific motherboard (although they can apparently be reactivated by phone and changing a hard disk probably won’t be enough to deactivate it).

changing a hard disk probably won’t be enough to deactivate it

But the OP is looking to take an SSD with Windows installed from a laptop to a new desktop. I have heard though that it is (or was) fairly straightforward to activate Windows via the automated telephone service, although probably be being a little selective in the responses chosen.

If it’s an OEM license I believe that it is tied to the BIOS and technically won’t activate on new hardware; however (you might be able to get around this using the automated telephone activation service if this still exists.

Both PCs have a license, but different ones. I think the desktop has a sticker on it. So perhaps I can simply type in the code from the desktop?

Does the desktop PC have Windows on it already? If it does (and you’re effectively just adding an SSD to it) it might be simpler to simply mirror its hard drive to the SSD once you’ve popped it in.

Can I just reinstall Windows on the fresh one with my MS account?

Yes – as I said earlier, it’s tied to the PC.

Does the desktop PC have Windows on it already?

That’s a point – if it already has W8 or higher then it should just cart on as normal. Otherwise, yes, you should just be able to feed it a W7 / W8.1 OEM key I think.

flyingmonkeycorps

Member
On the flip side – I’m planning on sticking a new SDD in my PC, and getting rid of the tiny one that’s in there now. Can I just reinstall Windows on the fresh one with my MS account? I’m not sure whether my Windows is OEM or retail tbh.

I’ve just replaced the HDD in my laptop with an SSD. I did a clean install, rather than cloning over the orignal one.
If you Google something like windows 10 media creation tool, there’s a Microsoft download that will then take you through the process.
Basically, you stick windows10 onto a usb stick (make sure it’s got nothing else on it & is at least 8Gb) & when you are ready to install; i.e. have replaced the old drive with the new one, you change the bios settings to boot from “USB HDD” and it’ll then install windows10 nice & fresh onto the new SSD.

At the end of the installation procedure, it will prompt to restart. When it does this, be sure to whip out the USB stick, before hitting OK. Otherwise when it reboots, the bios will send it to the USB stick and it will try to start the install again. I forgot to do that & was a bit confused why it seemed to be starting again.
It’s probably worth moving the USB HDD down the boot order again, aswell.

Here’s the Microsoft link:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10

Does the desktop PC have Windows on it already? If it does (and you’re effectively just adding an SSD to it) it might be simpler to simply mirror its hard drive to the SSD once you’ve popped it in.

That would be the opposite way round – the whole reason to do this is so I don’t have to reinstall the software etc that’s on the SSD.

change the bios settings to boot from “USB HDD”

Most if not all PCs have a “one-time boot menu” so you don’t have to change anything. Hitting F12 on boot to access this is common.