Question How can I have my gaming PC run my work laptops drive?

[TobleroneNeedlemyer]

My pc (i7 4ghz 16 gb 1t ssd gtx 1080ti) is much more powerful than my work provided laptop and Solidworks is too slow on it. Can I connect the two and have my hardware run everything on the laptops drive? I can’t copy files or install its programs on my machine. I want to treat the laptop as an external boot drive without any physical alterations then eject it and my pc is back to normal.

 

[popatim]

Not without installing it to your PC but that may not be bootable if the hardware is too dis-similar. Also if it does boot thenit may break the laptop being able to boot with it so be sure to make a full backup of it first. Lastly, disconnect your PC's internal drives when you boot off the laptops drive.

 

[TobleroneNeedlemyer]

Not without installing it to your PC but that may not be bootable if the hardware is too dis-similar. Also if it does boot thenit may break the laptop being able to boot with it so be sure to make a full backup of it first. Lastly, disconnect your PC's internal drives when you boot off the laptops drive.

If I were to do a complete physical swap of the hard drives I would have the same exact programs and files able to run but just on a machine with more power correct? It would look identical to the machine I took the hard drive from but faster due to new hardware. If that’s the case then why can I not connect the two computers and tell it to run off of the others drive? Is there no way to connect multiple drives to a case of good hardware and tell it which drive to run? If so how do make a laptop drive act as my pc drive without opening them up? Then when I travel I grab the laptop and be on my way as simple as disconnecting it from a docking port.

 

[bill001g]

If you were to completely swap the drive it likely would not boot or it would crash. And that is actually the best it could also write crap to the drive and when you put it back in the laptop it could be corrupted and not boot there either. I would not even attempt this....or maybe make a image copy of the drive and boot that.

In most cases you can not even swap the motherboard on a machine without a complete windows reinstall. The device drivers are too different.

Your really have to find a way to install the program on your machines. I suspect you are not using this option because there is some license restriction. This more than anything else is going to be the problem. It might actually be licensed to a particular cpu chip so even if you could boot the drive it would detect a difference cpuid.

True distributed computng actually has the application designed to run on multiple physical machines. The application itself would have parts installed on both machines.