Exchanging Harddrives between two thinkpads

[Paul S]

Has anyone tried to place the harddrive of one Thinkpad T40 into another Thinkpad T40 with almost identical configurations. In the situation I have in mind, the only differences would be the graphics chip Radeon 9000 and GL versions and the MAC addresses. Since the Radeon 9000 and GL can use the same graphics driver, I don't think this may be a problem but the MAC address may be a problem. Will Windows XP boot and can the differences in the hardware be easily corrected?

I would appreciate any comments for those who have tried such a senario.

[cynic]

Yes. I've done it too. I have a T40p and my friend has a T40. We have different wireless miniPCI cards, but that was fixed rather quickly (I have a IBM card and he has the Intel.) It was smooth sailing for the drive images.

(He liked my setup better with all my optimizations so I used Acronis to image my drive and imaged it to his drive... it was really simple and took 15minutes to image my drive and 25 minutes to reimage it to his drive. We had near the same software pre-load and all he had to copy was his "My Documents" folder back and forth to keep all his work and mail)

[NecessaryEvil]

I took a ghost image I made of my T41P and put it on my T42P. only thing I had to change was the modem driver and the monitor driver.

[JaneL]

I loaded NT40 on a 760EL and am now up to a T23 with W2k without ever reloading from scratch. Some of the transitions from model to model have been easier than others. I can't imagine that a jump from one T40 to another with the same operating system is going to be much of a hurdle.