But I want to make my I7 have the same everything as of my I9.
First of all, you cannot backup and restore just your installed programs from one system to another.
From the way you worded it, you want your source machine to be the i9. You want to put an exact copy of it on the i7. (or is it the other way around?)
You can use imaging software to make one system mirror the other
if certain criteria are met. Otherwise you will run into licensing and compatibility issues.
A. You did not say if your i7 is 10 or 11. Although 10 and 11 licenses are interchangeable, both systems must have an underlying license for the same
version of Windows (Home or Pro). If you have Home on your i7 you would have to purchase a Pro license for it since your i9 has Pro.
B: Your i7 machine
must be fully hardware compatible with windows 11. With restoring an image, you can go from an incompatible machine to a compatible one but
not the other way around.
1. Install your imaging software of choice. Make an image of
both systems and to play it safe I suggest backing up any non-Microsoft drivers on the i7 machine in case you have to manually restore any drivers. If your drives are encrypted (bitlocked) I would turn off bitlocker before making an image. I do not use Bitlocker myself and have never made an image with it turned on. Someone else may advise differently as I have no experience using it nor do I ever expect to use it. If you do use it, you can turn it back on later. There are a number of ways to backup your drivers, using apps or from within Windows, The easiest for me is a little standalone app called Double Driver.
Backing up and restoring your drivers can be especially handy when you have a computer where the drivers are no longer available, to rollback when you have a problem, or for mass deployment in a work environment.
www.majorgeeks.com
2. Restore the i9 image to the i7 by booting from your backup software recovery media. Depending on your drive pay attention to your partitioning here as I'm sure your source (i9) and target (i7) drives are probably different
in size. The imaging software I use allows me to size my partitions during the recover process.
Most everyone here agrees that hardware-wise Windows 10 and 11 are mostly forgiving with drivers and will install the correct ones after the restore is complete and windows update is run. ( If windows update does not find any driver, you can manually restore the one you backed up in step 1 or download from the manufacturer or from Intel.)
If the criteria are met, Windows should activate without issue on the target machine. If it doesn't, you can run the activation troubleshooter.
Regarding what software you use to make your images, there are numerous ones, some paid, some free.
Poll on Backup software Make sure you create recovery media and that you can boot from that media.
My choice is the paid version of Macrium. It's all I've ever used and I have imaged and restored one system to another a number of times.
(
To anyone else reading this, when using a straightforward restore, going from Intel to Intel or AMD to AMD has caused me no issues. In cases of restoring one to the other I always took the extra step and used Macrium ReDeploy for restoring to dissimilar hardware which also worked without issue.Whether this was necessary or not, I can't say but I played it safe. Note-Redeploy is not a feature of Macrium Free. Other imaging softwares have their own feature for this purpose)
