Win10 Home to Win11 Home Advanced dilemma

Bendmac said:

Greetings!

My old(er) PC does not meet the requirements to auto-upgrade from Win10 to Win11...it appears the i5-7400 (amongst other things) doesn't meet the necessary requirements. Because of that and the age of the current rig , I'm going to do an upgrade and get a newer PC. It's currently being built but I do not have it "in hand" just yet.

1. Current System:
-HP Envy PC w/ Win10 Home: Intel Core i5-7400 CPU, Intel HD graphics 630, 32GB RAM, (1) 500GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 SSD, (1) WD SATA 1TB SATA HDD

On this system, Win10 (plus all my desktop stuff, apps, docs, etc.) are on the 500GB SSD...Windows (C): drive, 237.83GB free of 460.12GB free. I have a BUNCH of photos stored on the 1TB Data (D): HDD drive and there shouldn't be any issues transferring that over to an SSD in the new rig.​

2. New system:
-HP Omen 45L GT22-1470se w/Win11 Home Advanced: Intel Core i7-13700K CPU, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060Ti w/8GB GDDR6 dedicated RAM, 32GB of DDR5-5200 Heatsink RAM, (1) 1TB WD Black PCle 4x4 NVme TLC M.2 SSD plus (1) 1TB 7200 SATA HDD, (3) PCle M.2 slots { (2) for SSD, (1) for WLAN }.

So here is my dilemma...HOW do I get the contents of that older 500GB SSD (minus the Win10) transferred over to the 1TB SSD in the new rig?
​

-It doesn't appear (at least that I know of...maybe someone else can advise) that there's a way to selectively uninstall Win10 from that 500GB SSD, other than completely formatting it, which would then kill all the stuff I'd really like to keep and get transferred;

-I thought about simply removing the 1TB SSD (with Win11)in the new rig when it gets here, installing the old 500GB Samsung from the old rig, and then just letting the Win10 that's already on there auto-upgrade to Win11 once the system recognizes that I now have a Win11-compatible machine. That way, I get the new OS plus I get to keep all my apps, etc. on that 500GB card. I'm just concerned this may cause more problems than it's worth with booting up the new system, etc.;

-Also thought about simply installing the older 500GB SSD in one of the available slots in the new rig. However, I would then have (2) versions of Windows on the same computer...Win11 on the 1TB SSD, Win10 on the (secondary) 500GB SSD. However, while the Samsung 970 is an NVMe M.2 SSD, I don't know if its PCle compliant and I'm also worried that I'll run into some Win10 vs. Win11 conflict issues;

-I have my "C" drive backed up in OneDrive, but it's the same issue...if I simply transfer from OneDrive to the new 1TB SSD, it'll send EVERYTHING, including the Win10 that I'm trying to get rid of.

So...sorry to be long-winded and a bit "noobish" but hoping that one of you experts out there can advise the best way to proceed! Thanks for any advice and assistance in advance...

Bendmac

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