Snorvey wrote:S'cuse my denseness, but what exactly is a 'system image'?
A system image is a copy of the partition(s) on your hard drive. It contains all the sectors of each partition that are in use and contain data. Should your hard drive die, then you could replace it with a new one, restore the system image to the drive, and it will be an exact replica of the drive as it stood when you made the system image. You will have your PC back up and running as it was before, complete with all your files and installed software.
The usual practice is to make the system image onto an external HDD. Only the used sectors are copied to the image, and because compression is used the image is generally about 60-70% of the total used space on the partitions being imaged.
The imaging software can make a bootable recovery usb that is used to restore an image to the hard drive. The imaging software I use is called
Macrium Reflect Free.
So if I bought a brand new machine and installed a system image from and older pc, the new one would be the same (but better)
You could, but there will be a mismatch in the installed drivers because of the hardware differences between the two machines. Windows 10 is usually quite good at sorting out new drivers though when it finds itself running on new hardware.
Activation of Windows may be a problem too. For Windows 10, as long as the new machine has the same edition of W10 installed as is in the image (Home or Pro) and has been run, configured for use and says it is activated with a digital licence, then the image should be activated when it is put on the new machine. I cannot say how a Windows 8 or 7 image may react. An additional problem with Windows 7 is that it cannot run on the latest hardware and/or processors.
I'd recommend, if you're buying a new machine, to use the Windows it comes with. Install any software you may need and copy your user files over to the new machine.