Can you restore the image of your PC to a similar PC? (just the drivers are different)

I have an Asus Dual Xeon Z8Pe running at 16 GB of RAM w/ Win 7 x 64, and the new PC will be a Asus P10S WS w/ Win 7 x64, at 16 GB of RAM.

what happens if I restore the image of my old system to the new PC? Obviously most of the drivers will be wrong, can I then re-install the drivers?

Windows 7 has a good chance of booting up, finding drivers, and then running fine.
I've done it a few times with my original August 2009 install of Win7 64bit. i7 870 to an i7 2600k, to an i7 3770k, to a dual Quadcore Xeon, and finally to a dual Xeon E5-2670.

I upgraded it to 10 last year, but here you can see the oldest installed programs,


Most people will recommend a fresh install for stability reasons, but I can't recall if my install has ever crashed on any of the systems.

From a technical standpoint it theoretically is possible, sure, my advice and my method for the very rare times I've done this - clean installs are ALWAYS the best solution, and that's never going to change - is to get the new machine set up up and built, test it with a Linux LiveCD/LiveDVD/LiveUSB or whatever prior to mucking around with Windows at all. If the machine works, and all the hardware is good to go, move the previous system drive from the Windows machine to the new machine and when you boot it the first time you're going to want to get into Safe Mode (press F8 like a madman as soon as the POST completes - booting it into Safe Mode then just letting it sit for like 5-10 minutes will cause the hardware detection routines to locate all the new hardware in the machine and set it up.

That does NOT mean that you try and install all the newest drivers for the hardware that Windows doesn't have support for natively at that point in time, you do NOT install drivers in Safe Mode. Once all the hardware that can be supported is detected and supported, you'll get a delay of a short period, maybe a minute or two, and then Windows will tell you that you have to reboot because of the new hardware it found. Do the reboot but this time do NOT go back into Safe Mode, allow Windows to load normally and again let it sit for 5-10 minutes without you mucking around with it at all, leave it alone basically while it "settles down" for a bit.

After maybe 10 minutes max, then you can go into Device Manager, see what hardware still needs drivers, then install them as you see fit from that point, even going so far as to update drivers that Windows provided natively.

I still never recommend doing this anytime, anywhere, on any hardware if it's Windows, this should be a last ditch we're gonna die Hail Mary kind of thing to do for Windows - Linux can be moved around, it's practically portable without any issues by design, but Windows isn't very keen on doing this. If you have issues in this process you'll still have the original image you made of the previous install so you can retrieve files from it if needed, but again a clean installation is ALWAYS the best solution.

For the record I've done this method I just described about 30 times over the years - compare that with like 35,000+ clean installations and I am not joking in the slightest - and it's never failed to "move" the Windows install to the new hardware. You will end up having to re-activate so I'm guessing you have a Retail Windows 7 license and you'll need the Product Key once more to go through that process.

The reason I ask this is last time I install / config. all the software in my PC, 3 yr. ago, it took 2 days. To re-install an image, less than 20 min. on a SSD. It took 2 days to remember all the settings / configuration on each software, it's a lot of time

I have had success with it before. I use EaseUS for the bulk of my cloning/imaging and typically the system just boots and I need to install the odd motherboard/GPU driver. Worst case I have to use ParagonAdaptive Restore 2010 and choose the boot from different hardware option if the system won't boot.

sysprep

Recent version of Acronis TrueImage allows you to restore to different hardware. It comes down to one's preference.

that's good to know. I have a free ver. of Acronis.

I used to take an image using Windows backup, restore the image to the new machine and then do a repair install of Windows 7 over the top and install graphics drivers, etc - Used to work fine most of the time.