Swapping SSD's between different laptops?

[Electroshadow]

Due to Windows 10 pretty good hardware detection and updates is it possible to just swap hard drives between 2 different laptops and with a bit of luck and hope they would reconfigure themselves?

laptop A (Dell)- current laptop with 1TB SSD (my daily work laptop)

Laptop B (Acer)- recently purchased replacement laptop which came with 256gb SSD.

is it possible to just switch them over?
That would be ideal as I would not lose all my software keys and have to reinstall a lot of software. Or is my only option to play a bit of Round robin cloning with some spare hard drives?

any other options would be good to hear

 

[Maundie]

Are they both 2.5" SSDs or is the new Acer one a M.2/NVMe do you know?

 

[Electroshadow]

im pretty sure they are both M.2

the old one is a Samsung evo860 1tb

 

[Maundie]

If that's the case then try it, I personally always do a fresh install when installing a new disc but I know not everyone wants to bother doing that.

 

[Electroshadow]

Right so in preparation I have cloned my current 1tb drive onto an old hdd.

Next I think I will try swapping the 1tb ssd with the 256gb ssd in the new laptop.
Should I remove all of the dell drivers and software from the old 1tb ssd before swapping?

 

[Maundie]

I wouldn't if you've already cloned it just put it into the Acer laptop, if it works fine then you can remove all the Dell drivers and clean the drive up, if not I'd do a clean install and go from there (you can always re-instate the cloned image and put it back in the Dell).

 

[matthab]

Personally I would do a fresh install. I tried the same thing with my new gaming rig, and while it worked fine for a few days things started to crop up. Windows update/Windows Activation all stopped working, boot up became unreliable and games performance was horrendous. Bear in mind this was just a disk swap. A fresh install resolved all this and its been no trouble since.

 

[Electroshadow]

Added the old EVO860 to the third drive slot, as i was going to transfer the data that i needed to the system ssd that came on the computer. But luckily the laptop booted up to my old drive for some reason? then reinstalled the drivers off of the new SSD that came on the laptop.

not what i intended but possibly the best outcome

 

[Armageus]

Windows Activation all stopped working

Wouldn't be an issue with big name OEM laptops, as they are all BIOS activated.