Sigh. New system, reuse HD?

So bummed. Stupid laptop died yet again. While I could theoretically ship it back to the guy who fixed it before and get it fixed again under warranty, it's not really fair to expect him to do that. Not his fault that it's a carpy design.

Ahem. Anyway, enough angst. If I build a new system, is it even possible to use the perfectly good hard drive from my doorstop? Or is Windoze Vista still going to decide that I'm trying to illegally copy it and nuke itself? It's been a long time since I've tried anything like this.

Granted, I can install it as a second drive and not have to reinstall CoX that way, but given my current financial situation it'd be *really* helpful to save the $200-ish I'd put into a new drive and new OS.

It is possible but not easy to transplant an installed copy of Windows from one computer to another. It works best if the two computers are very similar, and if too much of the hardware changes, copy protection will ask you to convince Microsoft that you aren't pirating.

As an example, moving a hard drive containing XP, a CD-ROM drive, and a network card from a Duron-based system to an Athlon XP-based system worked with no problems, but moving from the Athlon system to a virtual machine required deleting some files, making some registry changes, and dealing with copy protection.

Even if it DOES work you're asking for trouble reusing a Windows install from another machine; you're very likely to find something working strangely or corrupted registry entries on something else.

Every time I've ever tried to shortcut an install by reusing or upgrading I've had problems... I always just make a fresh clean install of Windows and start over. I haven't tried with Vista (the only machine I had with Vista got upgraded to XP right away) or Win7 but it's been problematic on every OS I've run since Windows 95 (95, 98, NT, 2k, XP)