Unless you're doing a BIG jump, like from legacy to UEFI, or SATA to NVMe, Windows will generally just figure it out.
There may be an occasional exception for when you've doing something weird (iirc the 11th-13th gen Intel RST need a slipstreamed or manually added drivers unless you change controller settings in the BIOS which may bite on laptops at the moment if you're unaware of having to do it).
But even for big jumps you can usually get it working with a bit of hackery pokery. Most recently I had to jump from a legacy C2Q system running Windows 10 to run bare metal on a 9th gen Core i3.
I ended up putting it onto a VM to run the upgrade from legacy to UEFI so I'd have something that'd actually boot on this annoyingly picky 9th gen i3 Dell system, but it worked.
I generally (ab)use Macrium Reflect, and have a copy of Parted Magic to hand, but it's extremely rare for me to find a machine I can't clone to dissimilar hardware.
The only one that stumped me recently was an XP machine running specific legacy software from a guy who died two decades ago. That I had to P2V. Worked though!
My old practice used to be to start safe mode & go delete as many devices drivers as I could. That got me pretty far.
These days though I've had a number of cases where some very humble small scoped bios change will cause windows to not boot. I've run into this quite a few times, and it's been quite an aggravation to me. I've been trying to get my desktops power consumption down & get sleep working, mostly in Linux, but its shocking to me what a roll-of-the-die it's been that I may have to do the windows-self-reinstall, from changing an AMD cool-n-quiet settings or adjusting a sleep mode option.
You don't if you move from one relatively modern machine to another. My current laptop SATA SSD has moved between... 4 different machines, I think? I'll have to "make" when I move to an NVMe SSD, maybe, but it might largely just work. Time may tell.
If you do things the Microsoft way, you just sign into your MS account and your files show up via OneDrive, your apps and games come from the Microsoft store anyway.
There's plenty to fault Microsoft for. Like making it progressively more difficult to just use local accounts.
I don't think "cloning a machine from hardware a decade old onto a brand new laptop may require expertise" is one of them.
> Like making it progressively more difficult to just use local accounts.
right. because they don't care about your hardware just your payment relationship with them.
> cloning a machine from hardware a decade old onto a brand new laptop may require expertise
you don't see the connection between all these facts? "coping all the work and effort you've collected on your personal machine for a decade _still_ unaccountably requires expertise."
If this were something so unusual that people would rarely want to do it this would be a reasonable point. The fact that this is such an obvious thing people want to do without having to have a monthly subscription first indicates that the product does not cater well to it's selected market segments.
There may be an occasional exception for when you've doing something weird (iirc the 11th-13th gen Intel RST need a slipstreamed or manually added drivers unless you change controller settings in the BIOS which may bite on laptops at the moment if you're unaware of having to do it).
But even for big jumps you can usually get it working with a bit of hackery pokery. Most recently I had to jump from a legacy C2Q system running Windows 10 to run bare metal on a 9th gen Core i3.
I ended up putting it onto a VM to run the upgrade from legacy to UEFI so I'd have something that'd actually boot on this annoyingly picky 9th gen i3 Dell system, but it worked.
I generally (ab)use Macrium Reflect, and have a copy of Parted Magic to hand, but it's extremely rare for me to find a machine I can't clone to dissimilar hardware.
The only one that stumped me recently was an XP machine running specific legacy software from a guy who died two decades ago. That I had to P2V. Worked though!