if i take my hard drive out of my laptop and put it in my desktop can i play the steams games that are installed on it?

Cathal Brady

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Jun 8, 2013
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i am currently building a desktop and i was wondering can i take the hard drive out of my dell laptop and put it in my desktop? because i don't currently have a hard drive or ssd. also will all the steam games that i installed on my hard drive in my laptop be able to function when i put it in my new computer? (keep in mind i have never booted up my new deskop yet). thanks :)
 

Abstractfear

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May 20, 2013
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Laptop hard drives run slower than a desktop, and are also a lot smaller. Technically, you could install it with a 2.5" mounting bracket, but at the price of HDD's these days, it is FAR better to buy a new one. You can Clone the laptop hard drive using a program like CloneZilla.
 

carowden

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Jul 11, 2012
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i believe you have to have a different product key to do that becuase windows is linked to the hardware that it is installed on. I would just wait and buy a desktop hard drive and then just validate steam on that pc as well. you will not lose your steam games when you move to the desktop, you'll just have to reinstall them
 

Tradesman1

Legenda in Aeternum
A couple of things to throw in here, part depends on you laptop drive, if it uses a standard sata connection then it can 'probably' go into the desktop - many laptops use plugin drives that plug into a slot and don't have a standard SATA connector, others use a film like connection. Also, can depend on your OS, if it's say Win7 (preferably fully updated) and has a SATA connector chances aren't bad, you fire it up and give it some time, Win will hopefully start, then look at your hardware on the desktop and try to load appropriate or generic drivers for the CPU/mobo/components/etc (so have your drivers disk(s) avaialble, it may ask for them. Will also have to re-authenticate your copy of Windows (hope it's a version not tied to the mobo, if it is, will have to call in and try)