I have an older Dell desktop that will need replacing shortly. The hard drive can be noisy, the memory is low, and the motherboard has issues. The hard drive is 250GB and runs Windows Vista Basic. There's a ton of stuff, programs etc. that I need that will likely not work on Windows 8. I need to keep Vista for now.
What's the least painful way of keeping it? Ideally, I'd be able to clone this hard drive onto a larger hard drive and stick that hard drive into a new desktop (somehow have to update drivers). Or I might need to partition the new hard drive and restore the current hard drive from a backup? At this point, what's the most sensible option - clone the Vista hard drive to an external hard drive at least for backup's sake, or clone to a larger internal drive in the hope of being able to use that in a new desktop without needing an intermediate backup/restore?
"clone to a larger internal drive in the hope of being able to use that in a new desktop" If you intend to put the cloned drive in to an entirely different computer to use as the Windows boot drive, that won't work. You have to install Windows from scratch. Windows will never start when the hard drive it's installed on is put in to a different PC which has different hardware.
You can certainly clone your old Dell's hard drive to an external drive as a backup, but you'll only be able to boot into Windows from that cloned drive when it's installed in the same PC it was cloned from (ie your old Dell).
So what's my best option at this point? I can clone the HD for backup, but this computer has a subpar processor and low memory. The motherboard can't be upgraded as that would also void the Vista activation. So at most I can add more memory to improve performance?
It doesn't make that much sense to invest so heavily in an old computer when new ones are so cheap. But I may just have to do that.
Take a system image with acronis or easus todo. Then restore it to your new drive using the "dissimilar hardware" option. You should be able to boot from that drive in the new machine now.
"You should be able to boot from that drive in the new machine now." Only after a repair install of the OS which during you feed it the new systems drivers.
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