What should I know when taking an SSD with win10 from one laptop to another laptop?

Just doing an upgrade. My current nvme is just fine and I are just curious if I should know anything when doing this process. I suppose my only concern is that I havent changed the throttle stop settings and the undervolt I was doing on 7700hq will apply to a 10870h. at about -.115mv

One person said awhile ago that one should reinstall a new windows on a new system when doing this simply because the current operating system is set on the last system and doing this will negatively impact performance. Is this true?

 

Well, the biggest difference is probably going from Gen 3 speed to Gen 4 speed with that sort of jump from 7 to 10 series CPU.

Impact from one system to another is mostly drivers that will auto install when moving from one platform to the next. You might have to go through device manager and double check that everything is updated to the newer drivers piece by piece.

Installing windows fresh on a new drive impacts performance by removing any fragmentation that has occurred over time from installing / updating things over time.

I rebuilt my server and copied over all the info from the prior drive to the new drive and ran into a couple of issues in the process.
1. needing to convert from a legacy boot to EFI - meant creating an additional partition for EFI (50MB) and rerunning the EFI boot installer
2. new system has an RTL 2.5gbps ethernet port on it and the driver needed to be blacklisted to enable the port to use a newer option

Windows is dumb enough to just keep running in most cases w/o any particular issue. You might run into the EFI issue though depending on how Windows was originally setup on the prior system. If you can't boot by porting over the image from the old drive to the new one in the new system then that's likely your issue. The new MOBO I paired with the 12700K I rebuilt with has an alleged legacy boot option but I couldn't get it running w/o switching to EFI.

There may be some other intricacies that don't stand out on the surface of upgrading from one system to another. It won't impact things significantly though to use your existing install / clone to the new drive though. Try it and if it doesn't work as expected then a fresh install might be the easier solution rather than wasting time troubleshooting what it could be.

As for drives you're wanting to look at the underlying controller whether it's Phison or something else. Personally I went with a SN850 1TB and can push write speeds of 5.1GB/s on it through some testing which is in line with what they put on the spec sheet. I looked through a ton of different stats / reviews before landing on the SN850 as a top contender for long term use. The ability to future proof beyond that would mean a different MOBO or an adapter when Gen 5 dries start hitting the market which doubles the speed again. In the case of laptops though that means a replacement laptop typically so...

 

Back up any files you want to keep on the old drive and format it in the new system. That's the best way to keep everything fresh and performing optimally.

 

For one thing that previous O/S and drivers aren't the same as the new Laptop and that will have issues. What others said is complete fresh install and updated drivers to match the new laptop. But you first need to backup your data/files created in the previous laptop so you can transfer the data/files back when the new laptop is done. And if this is OEM O/S matching O/S then your good but if this was custom O/S Retail then you need to contact MS when formatting is done to let them update to right system with your Product Key otherwise it will not work. And make sure to backup the software you installed *.exe files or media so you can reinstall them after the fresh O/S install.

 

Would not a "windows refresh/reinstall" in the boot options menu works just as fine? I want to say that in that way I can at least keep all my files, and operating system tweaks in say the registry intact, most if not all should be applicable to windows 10 and not hardware or driver bound.

 

browser froze and I did this on accident a second time.

 

It has to be a complete refresh O/S install to avoid any issues since your moving the drive to another system that has it's own drivers and software for that board version. You can always reinstall custom software to the new system and if you backup your data/files created you can always copy those back. When you swap your O/S to new system it requires a new Product Key if the old one doesn't work. Once you change board it will identify as new hardware and you might or might be able to activate the system because of it. Microsoft Windows is very particular and can be a pain sometimes. You can backup your registry tweaks if you know where they are and reload them back to the new Install. As others eluded to if when one moves the drive to new system it's best to reformat and reinstall the O/S to take advantage of the new hardware. What your doing isn't a Windows upgrade like from 7 to 10 on the same system - this update worked and sometimes didn't work for others and some had unintended issues later on. This is what I do but if you don't that is a choice you must decide yourself on. But a complete new install and activation helps to avoid unneeded pitfall of system migrations.

 

@ Casowen

I prefer to KISS it when doing this sort of thing. Anything present in device manager that's not on the new system gets removed and the new HW is detected and installed. The auto install driver probably won't be the newest but, neither would the driver included in the OS installable.

There's no need to complicate things unless you want to of course.