I just did a fairly significant hardware upgrade while keeping my hard disks. The old system was a dell Optiplex 745 with an Intel Core 2 duo, LGA 775. The new system is custom built, Intel i5 750.

I know you're supposed to do a clean install with a hardware upgrade like this, but I'd had success in the past doing the stealth hardware upgrade like this, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit gets through the loading screen and immediately blue screens and reboots.

Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit, which I have on an old hard drive from an AMD box (!!) loads up fine.

I ran through the windows memory checker just to be sure, and my memory is fine.

So, is the BSOD the result of some sort of protection mechanism specific to Windows 7? Is there any hope of salvaging that install?