Moving hard drive

yes you should be able to just plug her in and run as long as you dont format the hard drive of corse

Of corse no programs installed on the hard drive will work on the new pc but all data should be intact. Also if the hard drive has the Vista OS on it then might be a good idear to remove it after you have retrived any data you want from the vista files. The Vista files will just be useless data on the win7 pc.

thanks but about the programs even the games i have on it will not work?

Yes you can, but there are pitfalls. Most of which involve microsoft.

To move an existing OS, you just move the drive, do a repair install, and install the new motherboard drivers. On vista, you just do an upgrade install over the existing OS since the repair install function on NT 5(2000/xp/2003) was removed in NT 6(vista/7/2008). Thats the easy part.

The problem is that the vista OEM license is non-transferable. It would ask you to reactivate windows, which with those keys could only be done over the phone. In all likelyhood they would not do so since the OEM license cannot change motherboards.

However you said something about windows 7. Now you CANNOT upgrade from 32 bit to 64 bit on any version, but you can upgrade from vista 32 bit to Windows 7 32 bit. Tell me more about your copy of windows 7 and your plans for it.

By the way, what happens to the old machine after you move the drive?

the new pc will have a new hd with windows7 64bit as the os. I just dont want to reinstall all the games and download all the music.

as from the old pc not sure what i'm going to do with it.

If you go from vista 32 bit to 7 32 bit your ok. 32 bit to 64 bit will not upgrade.  

What version of 7 do you have? OEM, Upgrade, or full retail?

I mentioned the old PC because I wanted to make sure you kept an OS image before you finished because a lot of systems just come with a restore partition. But I just noted that its a dell, so it should come with its own windows disk.