Tech question for once

Anonymouse · Today, 21:12

My Win 8.1 laptop died on me; apparently the motherboard's had it. Well, it had a good run, 9 years. I got a dirt-cheap laptop running 10, so I could install Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 in Win 8 compatibility mode; I like certain features.

Why not on my Win 11 laptop? Because I already tried that - and somehow it destroyed 11, to the extent that I had to create a USB boot stick via my 8.1 laptop (which was okay at the time) and do a factory reset so drastic I had to fiddle with the UEFI and do a complete reinstall, that's why! Lesson learned!

This is also why I used 8 compatibility mode rather than installing direct - as I said, lesson learned. I suspect 10 would behave much the same way, i.e. dying on me!

But I have a 2TB SSD with Win 8.1 on it; I cloned the 500GB one before the motherboard died, intending to replace it and dual-boot Linux, but the board died before I could (my Win 11 M2 SSD was cloned to a 4TB one, and now that one is dual-booting Linux). So...what would happen if I replaced the laptop's 10 HDD (I hope it's a 2.5", as the 8.1 one is) with my Win 8.1 one, once the 1-month warranty is up? Will it work, or will Win 8.1 be so upset by the change in hardware that it'll refuse to run?

This doesn't really qualify as a gamble; worst-case, it doesn't work and I put the 10 drive back. It's just that APE 6 isn't quite the same; I can't get used to the cursor on Freehand Select. In fact I actually prefer 8.1 to 10 or 11 - much as I preferred 2000 to Vista. The quote from Agent Coulson in my signature springs readily to mind...

Jaymoss · Today, 21:16

Gonna imagine you are gonna run into driver support issues with newer hardware on an out of date OS. Have you considered creating a virtual machine?

Anonymouse · Today, 21:32

I'm not worried about support, TBH - my Win 8.1 laptop was never updated, because I didn't and don't trust Micro$oft, and it worked perfectly until it died.

No, I just want to know if the 8.1 drive will work in the 10 laptop, or not - supposedly they get snarky about certain hardware changes, though 11 hasn't objected to moving from a 2TB M2 SSD to a 4TB one.

(BTW, I still cringe about asking PC Specialist about upgrading, because I was used to 2.5" units and both the existing 2 TB and the new 4TB were M2 - I'd said I couldn't find the drive, not realising it was an M2 as I knew about them but hadn't used one before, and so I didn't recognise the drive as a drive at first - but once I did, installing the new one was embarrassingly easy!)

It doesn't even object to sharing the drive with Linux Mint.

Mint, of course, couldn't care less.