When it rains it pours.

Had just gotten my Win 7 64-bit Home Premium that had become buggy fully fixed. (Thanks to those who helped in my recent thread.) And now my 5 year old Dell 3847 has died. It won't start windows giving me a start up repair routine or try regular start up again. Swapped between my new SSD and old mechanical HDD boot disks... made no difference. Battery and PSU are okay and all cables tight. Figure something on the motherboard has gone south. Machine is long in the tooth at this point.

Anyhow, my question:

Say I get a new dual disk machine with a 256Gb M.2 SSD boot and 1Tb storage HDD. It can handle more drives so I want to install my week old Samsung 1Tb SSD with Win7 on it and make it the boot drive. I can play with Win10 or even add Linux Mint while relying on my Win7 to get things done. I really don't want to make the switch wholesale yet.

***Will it work?***

I ask because nagging in the back of my mind is the thought that the Dell supplied Win7 OS won't work properly in another brand of machine. Am I just paranoid?

It's likely Windows 7 will hate you because you have a different hardware configuration and different driver requirements.

If you're lucky and it actually boots instead of blue-screening, you can try to install the correct drivers for everything and re-activate, but your odds aren't good.

Is it beeping when you try to boot? If it's getting to the win loading screen, everything on the MB is working at least initially (still could be something getting hot & failing, like a video chip). but more likely something in software is hosed. Less trouble to nuke & pave vs try to fix it (my opinion on just about any OS issues)
1. blow the dust out
2. re-seat all cables. Make sure the terminals don't push out of the connector - some cheap-ass molex will do that.
3. Pull the CMOS battery for 30 seconds, replace
4. see if it will boot.
5. Nuke the OS & re-install. If you don't already have everything backed up, you can put the drive in another machine (or boot from the old HDD, and copy the newer stuff from the SSD) and do so. Then smack yourself & get a plan to back up so you don't have to do this again.

As said, an older win7 install from an older machine isn't likely to play nice with brand new hardware right out of the box. Less trouble to nuke & pave vs try to fix it (my opinion on just about any OS issues). Even then, unless there's something that requires you stick to win7, I wouldn't waste my time.

Why so afraid of win10? It has it's quirks, but it's not the horror story some make it out to be. It's been out for what, 4 years now? It's stable, at least for microsoft. Win7 on newer hardware would be more of a pain in the ass due to drivers, functionality, etc. Do you swap the engine from your old car when you buy a new one, just because its familiar?

If you are getting new aka current hardware it would be a mistake to install W7.
Furthermore much of the new hardware primarily supports W10 and beyond.
It is MUCH easier to install and update W10 vs W7 which take literally forever to install/update with the possibility of incompatibilities.
Advice: W10 Pro

Addtionally, using a ssd for boot drive and spinner for data is outdated.
Note: there is as difference between M2 Sata and M2 NVMe.
Either consider larger SSD which SSD SATA3 drives are also almost outdated now too.
M2 SSD NVMe drives (requires mb that supports it) are 5 times faster than SSD Sata which is 5 times faster than Spinner Sata HD.
If you are on a real budget vs needing lots of storage then you could install Optane Module in M2 slot and use a traditional Sata (or Sata SSD) where the Optane module caches the frequent instructions.
However, IMO the pricing of drives today is getting more competitive I just use a larger drive to begin with.
Optane is effective but the price advantage is diminishing and take a little more configuration and is only available with certain chipsets, cpu's and must install on W10.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:

Advice: W10 Pro

This. Win10 is awesome. I had made a "recovery thumb drive" for my Win 10. When I went from HDD to SSD, it was just a matter of replacing the HDD with blank SSD, plugging in the USB recovery thumb drive and the process was super easy.

Moral of story: Make a USB recovery thumb drive. Do it now

quote:

Addtionally, using a ssd for boot drive and spinner for data is outdated.

Is this just because SSD's are so cheap now? I have SSD as a boot/working/main drive, and the windows backup function (whatever it's called in Win 10) goes to HDD with all my data as one of my 3 back-ups. I don't really see that as a disadvantage. Am I missing seeing something?

(one of my backups is offsite over the network using iDrive -- something else I endorse since losing data sucks).

For high capacity, hard drives are still inexpensive per gigabyte. I also use SSDs for my "boot/working" drives but use hard drives for backups.

1TB SSDs are finally getting affordable, Samsung & Crucial drives are now at $128-160.

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:

quote:

Addtionally, using a ssd for boot drive and spinner for data is outdated.

Is this just because SSD's are so cheap now? I have SSD as a boot/working/main drive, and the windows backup function (whatever it's called in Win 10) goes to HDD with all my data as one of my 3 back-ups I don't really see that as a disadvantage. Am I missing seeing something?

(one of my backups is offsite over the network using iDrive -- something else I endorse since losing data sucks).

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:

quote:

Addtionally, using a ssd for boot drive and spinner for data is outdated.

Is this just because SSD's are so cheap now? I have SSD as a boot/working/main drive, and the windows backup function (whatever it's called in Win 10) goes to HDD with all my data as one of my 3 back-ups. I don't really see that as a disadvantage. Am I missing seeing something?

(one of my backups is offsite over the network using iDrive -- something else I endorse since losing data sucks).

Nothing wrong with it - just it is becoming outdated and unnecessary.
Yes, because of the dropping SATA SSD costs and alternate methods like Optane.

It also depends on your growth rate of storage and storage needs.
If your rate is moderate just get a larger drive to begin with.
If the storage needs are great - video recording comes to mind then a two drive method might be better.

It also depends on how you use the data too, Optane modules are cheaper than SSD drives and allows caching of the data drive.
If you have SSD OS then a standard data drive > the data drive will not perform as well.
Optane does work but still not as good as full SSD (preferably MVMe).

Also while SSD is becoming more common knowledge the SATA limitations are catching up with it.
M2, PCI or U2 interfaces support much better performance and will be the standard soon.