Experiment

[MadBurgerMaker]

So I work for a state entity (UT), with a department that, while not broke, generates nearly all it's money through research grants that go primarily to the researchers, leaving...not so much for the admin people, etc.  As "the IT guy" for this department, I've been trying to get all our computers upgraded (we're using old Lenovo Thinkcentres with, like, first gen i3's AT BEST...mine is an old Core2Duo that has cannibalized RAM in it to get it to a whopping 4GB), but they haven't had the scratch.  Instead, as an experiment, I went to the warehouse and collected a couple of not as old Thinkcentres with 2nd generation i5s.  The RAM and HDDs were stripped out by the people who sent them there, so for the first test to see how it'll do Im just using old stuff I had at home (I have a little bulletproof Samsung 840 120GB SSD in my current one now, and am bringing 8GB of PC3-10600 RAM in tomorrow, which is the max the new board can handle). 

My question is this: since I'm not ready to reimage my drive for this, because I might need to just stick it back in the old machine due to....well shit not working (it was in the warehouse, after all)...if I set it up in BIOS to boot to whatever my current machine is using (UEFI or Legacy), what will happen if I just....plug the drive in and fire it all up?  Has anyone ever tried that?  OS on the current machine is up to Win 10 64 enterprise.  Will it boot and try to find the proper drivers?  Fire and explosions?  What am I looking at here?

E:  I'm pretty sure they'll generally boot, since they do turn on, I just haven't had any RAM to put in there or anything like that, so there could be all sorts of things wrong with them that I don't know about yet.  They also recognize HDDs, since I was able to shove one that was destined for an iMac in there for a couple minutes.  I *think* they came from one of the big baller departments that throw money around and upgrade their shit pretty regularly, so hopefully they're all good and were just sitting in my counterpart's office for a while before being sent to the warehouse.

[DontSayBanana]

So I work for a state entity (UT), with a department that, while not broke, generates nearly all it's money through research grants that go primarily to the researchers, leaving...not so much for the admin people, etc.  As "the IT guy" for this department, I've been trying to get all our computers upgraded (we're using old Lenovo Thinkcentres with, like, first gen i3's AT BEST...mine is an old Core2Duo that has cannibalized RAM in it to get it to a whopping 4GB), but they haven't had the scratch.  Instead, as an experiment, I went to the warehouse and collected a couple of not as old Thinkcentres with 2nd generation i5s.  The RAM and HDDs were stripped out by the people who sent them there, so for the first test to see how it'll do Im just using old stuff I had at home (I have a little bulletproof Samsung 840 120GB SSD in my current one now, and am bringing 8GB of PC3-10600 RAM in tomorrow, which is the max the new board can handle). 

My question is this: since I'm not ready to reimage my drive for this, because I might need to just stick it back in the old machine due to....well shit not working (it was in the warehouse, after all)...if I set it up in BIOS to boot to whatever my current machine is using (UEFI or Legacy), what will happen if I just....plug the drive in and fire it all up?  Has anyone ever tried that?  OS on the current machine is up to Win 10 64 enterprise.  Will it boot and try to find the proper drivers?  Fire and explosions?  What am I looking at here?

E:  I'm pretty sure they'll generally boot, since they do turn on, I just haven't had any RAM to put in there or anything like that, so there could be all sorts of things wrong with them that I don't know about yet.  They also recognize HDDs, since I was able to shove one that was destined for an iMac in there for a couple minutes.  I *think* they came from one of the big baller departments that throw money around and upgrade their shit pretty regularly, so hopefully they're all good and were just sitting in my counterpart's office for a while before being sent to the warehouse.

With the OS seeing a different processor, you'll have to reactivate the machine, but that's about it.  It's not like you're going from a strict 32-bit to a 64-bit or anything weird like that.

[MadBurgerMaker]

That's it?  Hell, that's not a big deal at all.  Thanks DSB.