I have a T410 running W7 Professional, with 500G HDD.

I am considering getting a new T420 with W7 Home, with 320G HDD.

In order to avoid re-installing all the software/apps on the new T420, I am planning to "swap" the HDD from the T410 to the new T420.

Will this work

Some parts are compatible, yes. The hard drive will fit.

I do not think that the Windows installation and software will work. You could use your Windows 7 Pro recovery disc from the T410 on the T420 for a clean install of Professional. Although it is against the license agreement, the recovery disc will work. You would need to download appropriate drivers from Lenovo's support site afterwards, as the T410 disc will not have all the stuff the T420 needs.

Since you are running Win 7, you have at least an even chance of the drive being able to boot and run Win 7 in a T420, to a point where you can run System Update to acquire the additional drivers you will need for the new system.

Cheers,

Bill B.

With the mismatch of the Windows 7 pro vs Windows 7 Home be a problem?

You cannot downgrade from Pro to Home so far as I know, and in my other travels (Experts-Exchange), Home is very poor value. Stay with Professional no matter how you go about it.

I recommend you call Lenovo and pay for the proper recovery media. The media is worth the money, especially when the hard drive fails. There are different views, but I find the Lenovo media to be good and I can uninstall the few things I do not need much faster than getting all the drivers for a clean install.

My Thinkpad has no Windows 7 media, so I had to buy the license and do a clean install. The statement above is the voice of experience. .... JDH

A recovery install, to me, means 100 processes running on fresh start; it was that way with the T/Wx10 and it's the same way with the T/Wx20 series also. After a bit of pruning I could get it down to about 85 or so, but that's as low as it ever got.

Not having a Windows 7 disk of X version is not a cause for panic, as you can find the links to download all versions here (the links are from Microsoft's distributor- if you bought a copy of Windows online, that's the download link you'd get).

It's a bit more work to hunt down drivers when doing a fresh install (and by 'work' I mean download them all from Lenovo's matrix: networking doesn't work so be aware that you need some other way of getting that driver onto the machine), but the end result is worth the couple of hours it takes to do that as you'll only have 60 or so processes running with the minimum outfitting possible.

>>> means 100 processes running on fresh start. <-- There is nothing wrong with that at all. Processes use memory but no CPU if properly set up. I have 130 processes running on my T61p, and have had "forever". CPU runs less than 5% more than 95% of the time.

Processes (properly done) mean your computer is always ready for work. ... JDH

Actually, the reason I wanted to be able to do a swap is that I want to migrate the existing win 7 pro installation on T410 onto the new T420, and to just install whatever come with the new T420 (ie., Win 7 Home) on the old T410. However, it looks like this is going to be problematic due to different drivers, etc.

The other reason I wanted to migrate my existing T410 installation to the new T420 is that I had done a clean install on the T410, and do not wish to repeat that again on the new T420. (It will save me a few hours of work ... )

I guess I will have no choice but to do the re-installation on the T420. So the only question I have now is whether it is possible to "swap" the OS. That is, install Windows 7 Pro on T420 and Windows 7 Home on T410. (Remember that I bought T410 with Win 7 Pro and T420 with Win 7 Home)

Legally the answer is no. The OEM license does not allow for that. Technically the answer is yes, but talk about that kind of thing can get a thread locked around here supposedly.

Perhaps I should close out this thread