Metanis
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 939
- Location
- Medford, WI, USA
Yes, I should've done a clean install. I know that up front.... But sometimes you need to experiment....
So, I've seen some videos lately of how forgiving Windows 10 is to hardware changes.
This weekend I had a customer tired of his slow Dell Inspiron A10 system he bought nearly 5 years ago. He's cheap so I got him a Refurb Core i7 Optiplex 9020 and a 1TB Evo 960 SSD. Then I cloned the Inspiron drive to the new 960 drive and installed that drive in place of the drive that came with the Optiplex.
So the boot drive went from an AMD A10 to an Intel i7 and the machine booted normally although a bit slowly as it downloaded and installed all the new drivers it needed!
I should note that the Inspiron had a retail version of Win10 Pro which remained happily activated. I had to do a telephone reactivation on his Office Pro 2019. And I still need to reactivate a CAD-related LOB application that also recognized the hardware change.
Other than that, I failed to recognize that a Microsoft login is the same as a Domain login, so in order to fix his login PIN I had to revert to local login, delete all files in C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\Microsoft\ngc, and then go back to his Microsoft login and the PIN began to work again. If I ever do this again I'll remember to switch to a local login before cloning the source drive!
Then I did a full tune-up on the Optiplex 9020 because just like any brand-new machine it didn't have the current BIOS and now needed a complete set of Dell and Intel drivers.
Since it worked so well I decided I wasn't going to go back and do a clean install. I then proceeded to uninstall or delete every reference to the old AMD hardware and drivers. (Including all the hidden devices left over in Device Manager!)
From a licensing standpoint, I will wipe the older Inspiron system and then boot it with the Refurb disk. Yes I suppose it's not legal because each machine will be using the other machine's Win 10 Pro license. But both licenses were legit when I started. He will end up with his old machine with a minimal Win10 installation which he can repurpose.
TL
R? Maybe WAAS isn't so far away? Won't it be nice when software is no longer force-linked to hardware?
So, I've seen some videos lately of how forgiving Windows 10 is to hardware changes.
This weekend I had a customer tired of his slow Dell Inspiron A10 system he bought nearly 5 years ago. He's cheap so I got him a Refurb Core i7 Optiplex 9020 and a 1TB Evo 960 SSD. Then I cloned the Inspiron drive to the new 960 drive and installed that drive in place of the drive that came with the Optiplex.
So the boot drive went from an AMD A10 to an Intel i7 and the machine booted normally although a bit slowly as it downloaded and installed all the new drivers it needed!
I should note that the Inspiron had a retail version of Win10 Pro which remained happily activated. I had to do a telephone reactivation on his Office Pro 2019. And I still need to reactivate a CAD-related LOB application that also recognized the hardware change.
Other than that, I failed to recognize that a Microsoft login is the same as a Domain login, so in order to fix his login PIN I had to revert to local login, delete all files in C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\Microsoft\ngc, and then go back to his Microsoft login and the PIN began to work again. If I ever do this again I'll remember to switch to a local login before cloning the source drive!
Then I did a full tune-up on the Optiplex 9020 because just like any brand-new machine it didn't have the current BIOS and now needed a complete set of Dell and Intel drivers.
Since it worked so well I decided I wasn't going to go back and do a clean install. I then proceeded to uninstall or delete every reference to the old AMD hardware and drivers. (Including all the hidden devices left over in Device Manager!)
From a licensing standpoint, I will wipe the older Inspiron system and then boot it with the Refurb disk. Yes I suppose it's not legal because each machine will be using the other machine's Win 10 Pro license. But both licenses were legit when I started. He will end up with his old machine with a minimal Win10 installation which he can repurpose.
TL
