Switching Computers Easily

I experienced a computer crash last week. Traced it down to a broken trace on the motherboard or a broken cable that connects the motherboard to the hard drive. To the extent I was able to resurrect it a couple of times before it died completely on the next day. Luckily it was the motherboard, not the hard drive.

Following my previous experience in moving a Windows 10 hard drive between two completely different systems and having the new one up an running in minutes, I decided to do the same with the replacement machine. Unbox it, remove the factory installed hard drive, put the one taken out from the broken computer and - voila: I was up an running in minutes. What is more important: the whole system configuration is unchanged. Folders, drivers, saved passwords, web history, everything.

This makes it obvious that the default procedure for migrating to a new machine should be the same: clone your old drive to the new machine and boot it up. Done.

Except.

Except this is not supported from licensing perspective. Microsoft ties the windows license to a physical machine. So the new one you buy comes with a new license and the old license cannot be used. Which is stupid, because you have actually bought that new license.

And except this upgrade mode is not supported by Windows out of the box. It requires opening the machine, extracting a drive, plugging it to a secondary adapter, running a cloning software. While it should just put the old machine in a special mode when it becomes just a USB drive and (thanks to USB Type-C) can be plugged to the new one for cloning.

Computer upgrade has usually been a traumatic experience for many. It does not have to be. But for some reason the native support for this upgrade mode has not been on the Microsoft's radar. An opportunity for 3rd party cloning applications?