wipe brand new laptop

[1sty]

I bought my wife a new laptop to replace hers that suffered a hard drive death and was XP.
I think the rest of her machine still works and I am wondering if I can get a new SSD for the new one and just put in the SSD and reload windows 7 on the new one as soon as I get it and use the hard drive out of the new one to replace the dead one in her old laptop, then load a fresh copy of windows 7 on that.

Can/should this be done?

 

[corroded]

it is one of the ways to do it... Did you get Factory Restore Disks? That is least $$

 

[mbreslin1954]

Yes, you can, but don't wipe the new hard drive, just clone it to a new SSD. Otherwise you will have issues with activating or authenticating Windows 7.

As to the old laptop, yes, you probably can put the new hard drive from the new laptop in that and install a new copy of Windows 7, but it will have to have its own license key, you won't be able to use the one from the new laptop.

However, successfully running Windows 7 on the old laptop depends on the hardware it has. Does it have at least 2 GB of RAM? Does it have at least a dual-core CPU?

 

[1sty]

Thanks for the reply.
What is the simplest means of cloning the drives?
The old laptop has two gigs of ram and is a core 2 Duo 1.4 MHz processor.

I have it up and running with windows 7 right already but I do not trust this hard drive.

 

[1sty]

it is one of the ways to do it... Did you get Factory Restore Disks? That is least $$

I am 80% doing this to get an SSD in the new one.

I do not have a factory restore disk for the XP machine any more and figured it would not be the best of ideas to keep it going at this point.

 

[mbreslin1954]

I use Acronis True Image, but that costs money. There are free tools. Actually Windows 7 itself comes with a nice tool for making a complete backup image of the "C" drive, but then you'd need a Windows 7 book disk in order to restore it to a new disk (essentially cloning it).

This free software also works. Although I have never used it, I've read enough about it and seen endorsements from respected publications and writers to have confidence in it:

http/www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm

 

[corroded]

I use the todo free... it will let you resize the partition when cloning. Do not change the SATA settngs if you are going to do a clone.