"Ant" wrote
| According to
|
https://www.howtogeek.com/239312/how...ws-7-8-and-10/,
| it says you can't restore a back up to another PC. Is that true?
|
It's complicated. First is the license. If you have
an OEM computer the system is tied to that. It
won't activate if you move it. If you bought a full
version it can be moved as often as you like, as
long as it's only on one machine at a time.
The other issue is the hardware. I've never tried
moving Win7 to a different machine but XP handles
it just fine as long as the IDE drivers are
uninstalled first. It's easier if you remove as many
drivers as possible, then shut down and image it.
I've even adapted an XP install from a single-core
CPU to multi. It requires swapping out hal.dll, which
is a rather esoteric task, but doable.
I would guess that 7 handles it easier than XP.
Another thing you need to consider is boot
partitions. Win7 has a messy system for boot.
If you want to move it, it'd b e easier to put it
all on on partition before imaging. I do that in general
with all Win7, before doing any disk image backup.
It's too confusing keeping track of multiple partitions
dependent on each other. And consolidating them
is not difficult.
Relaed to that is editing the boot config. That's
another area that's an easy text edit on XP and a
big production on 7. I use BootIt, which includes
instructions and an editor for Win7 boot.
Those are just a general outline of things you'll
need to know about. But the only real showstopper
is OEM licensing. I've heard you can cheat the system
somehow. I don't know about that. I know that
under normal circumstances an OEM license --
on a store-bought machine or from an OEM disk
that you bought for about $100 -- is tied to the
first system it's installed to. On a homemade machine
that means you can only move it to a similar machine,
with the same motherboard. On an OEM machine the
activation is on the motherboard, put there by the
OEM company. Either way, copying a disk image to
a different computer is probably not going to activate.