Removing an Operating System?

[MetaD]

I have an old laptop that was store bought and broke about a few months ago and has been sitting in my room for a while now. Now that I'm trying to build a gaming pc I don't have much money to work with and I'm trying to cut down costs as much as I can. I was thinking about using the hard drive in my broken laptop and reusing it in my new desktop pc. One problem came to mind. There is an operating system (Windows 7) on the hard drive and I'm not sure if I can use it because it already has an operating system from a computer with different parts. Should I buy the rest of my parts, hook up the hard drive and remove the operating system?
Thanks.

 

[unksol]

You can not reuse the OS but you can use the harddrive. Buy a new OS and when you install it it will ask you where to install. Delete the current partition and create a new one

 

[drkatz42]

I have an old laptop that was store bought and broke about a few months ago and has been sitting in my room for a while now. Now that I'm trying to build a gaming pc I don't have much money to work with and I'm trying to cut down costs as much as I can. I was thinking about using the hard drive in my broken laptop and reusing it in my new desktop pc. One problem came to mind. There is an operating system (Windows 7) on the hard drive and I'm not sure if I can use it because it already has an operating system from a computer with different parts. Should I buy the rest of my parts, hook up the hard drive and remove the operating system?
Thanks.

You can definitely use the hard drive but you'll be best served by wiping the drive and installing a fresh copy of windows. If it boots without wiping, it will recognize that you have a totally new configuration and will prompt you to reactivate. You can try to reactivate but this goes against the eula.

 

[USAFRet]

Are you talking about installing a new OS on the old laptop drive? Doable, but not a great idea. That laptop drive is old (may fail at any time?), and probably a slow 5400 RPM drive.

$55 for a new 1TB drive will save you much brain ache.