Restore boot drive from old laptop to new laptop

Hello,

I've used Paragon to backup and restore system and data partitions, but always it was movement within the same system, or a restore to blank, removable disk.

I am now in the situation where I have a backup of a complete disk (which includes a bitlocker encrypted partition, I think), as well as an EFI partition and a recovery partition. Usually, I'd just take this to another machine, with the blank disk I'm restoring to mounted in a hard drive enclosure, and just restore it, resize what I want to, handle the boot settings separately - it just works.

But, now I'm in the situation where the drive I want to restore to cannot be removed from the computer it's in and placed in a hard drive enclosure. Right now, it has a minimal Windows 10 installation on it.

So, some of these are Paragon questions and some are Windows questions, but this is the first time I've done a restore this way.

What happens when you backup one laptop but then restore to a completely different make and model of laptop?

Do I end up with cruft like, say, a fan control app launched at startup that was particular to the other computer?

Is the EFI partition (or the recovery partition) particular to the specific kind of computer it came from anyway and is not worth restoring, or I should just let windows recreate them?

Is the Windows installation activated to the new hardware?

If my file system had junctions do they need to be setup again?

How do I access Paragon software to do the restore? I used the Paragon password protected format when I did the backup.

Do I boot to a Windows minimal installation on the disk I want to overwrite, or do I boot with my windows 10 usb stick?

Is there a line folks have drawn between when (that is, some aspect of how many apps were installed, whether they are still available, etc) it makes sense to backup/restore a partition versus going with a new installation of windows and setting up everything again and just copying over the user files?

If it matters, the drive backed up was on a really old Fujitsu laptop and is being restored to a newer Microsoft surface laptop.

Please refer to our knowledgebase entry "Migration methods".

Please refer to our knowledgebase entry "Windows becomes unactivated after copy or migration".

IMHO it would be a chance to start from scratch what I prefer every now and then. That means installing Windows and getting your own data from the old laptop.

Own data does not include programs, of course. Programs have always to be installed on a new Windows.

If you don't want that you can create/restore an image of the system HDD of your old laptop to the surface. Windows should be set back to generic drivers during (I assume) the restore operation.

The surface should start but you have to gather and install all the drivers for the surface manually. Touchscreen and all that stuff.