Minimising software reinstallation after major hardware upgrade?

[Mr Badger]

I'm about to perform a major hardware upgrade to my aging PC, essentially just retaining my existing case and multiple hard drives. Although some sources suggest that Windows 10 is clever enough to pick up on hardware changes I'm assuming it's still better to go for a clean install rather than clone my existing SATA SSD, so have prepared a USB stick to install Windows 10 on a new 1TB NVMe SSD that will be the system/boot drive.

My question is once I have a clean version of Windows up and running with the new hardware, what can I do to use software that is already installed and minimise the amount of reinstallation? The data will all still be there on the old drives, but how good is Windows 10 good at this and is there anything I can do to make the path easier?

Or does anyone think that just cloning the old install is the right thing to do? Sounds risky to me considering that nearly all the components are changing, unless I'm doing Windows 10 a disservice...

 

[Mr Badger]

Windows 10 is very good at picking up new hardware.

You aren't going to waste much time by trying the old install. If you're cloning to a new drive you already have a full backup to fall back on if it doesn't work out. No risk involved.

Interesting. As far as I'm aware my old motherboard (Gigabyte Z68x-ud3-b3) doesn't support NVMe drives, so presumably I would need to boot up the new system from the old SATA SSD and then (if that works) clone it to the NVMe and make that the boot drive.

 

[Mr Badger]

Would backing up the old system, doing a fresh install of Windows on the new hardware and then restoring from the backup make the existing programmes available? Or will I just mess up my clean install?

 

[Mr Badger]

What cloning tool are you considering, does it have an option to create bootable media? If so, use it to create an image of the old system disk and then again to restore that to the new system.

Any tips for a free solution that will get the job done? I've got Macrium Reflect installed but not tried this procedure with it yet.