Windows 8.1 upgrade

[Neohart]

Hello,

Long time lurker and now, first time poster hoping to get a straight answer.

I decided it was time to upgrade my old desktop to a completely new setup. However, I would like to keep and use my old HDD from my HP with Windows 7 on it.

After some research it seems that the general consesus is that you can't do that. I can get a Windows 8.1 upgrade disk rather cheaply due to being a member of school staff.

My question is this:

Can I use the 8.1 upgrade disk on my old windows 7 drive then put it in my new desktop without windows getting all upset about it?

 

[SortNVF]

Id really suggest a dualboot solution, least till you get a feel for Win 8.1. Personally i felt like it was a horrible mistake letting it live longer than aero did on my system (3½mins).
It looks like old peoples desktops and its not really compatible with anything, also once infested youll need a ghost image of your previus install to get things back in order.
You can partially repair Win8 by installing an app that gives you an allmost real start button, from there all you need is to get rid of all the noisy tiles and apps spamming your desktop.

Win8 and the metro interface works well with touch screens, but my personal feel for it was like trying to pass out candy at a kids birthday party, while doing my income tax.

 

[Neohart]

Well, I'm moving the hard drive to a whole set-up, or want to at least, but I know windows might not let me activate it because of the motherboard.

I don't have any disks for it becuase when I bought it, it didn't come with any. Just the recovery partition.

Im just trying to save some money and not have to shell out 99$ for a new operating system and have to buy a new HDD when the one I have works perfectly fine for me.

It doesn't have to be 8.1 I just thought using the upgrade CD would let me install it to a fresh computer without any activation issues.