Software Configuration

Computer upgrade used to be a fairly traumatic experience. Especially on a Windows machine (I don't have too much experience with OS X) it usually meant many hours of re-installing applications and re-configuring drivers for all peripherals such as printers. And only recently I realized it no longer has to be.

A simple method we decided to try when upgrading my son's machine. He was using a 2010 Mac Mini running Windows 10 on an upgraded SSD drive. The Mac itself still performs very well, but the graphics performance - never a strong feature of Macs - has been absolutely inadequate to run most of 2017' games. Weighing his budget carefully he found an option to buy a 17-inch refurbished Lenovo Y-700. A beast of a laptop. Refurbished meant "no operating system included" - but we figured out the license of his Windows 10 copy running on the Mac was perfectly adequate to run on the new machine.

After pre-allocating a whole day for the migration process we carefully removed the SSD from the Mac and put it in the Lenovo. 10 minutes later it was all up and running with all the hardware configured and - the most important part - all his personalized environment preserved.

Windows 7 - and then even more - Windows 10 - removed the need for periodic "OS reinstall" that was plaguing Windows machines since the very beginning. The old Windows systems tended to get slower every week, month, year, and the remedy was to run a clean install. With the 7 this has no longer been the case and the 10 seems to be even better - never showing any signs of aging and slowing down. System - level hardware detection and setup is also a breeze.

So probably the way to install any new Windows computer is now to either put the old drive in the new one or duplicate the old drive to the new one and power it up (provided the OS license allows for that). Unfortunately this has never been a recommended way of a machine setup by manufacturers.