I currently work in 2 different locations, traveling between the 2 every few weeks or so. I currently have screens, kb, mouse etc… in both locations, so I just pick up my tower case when I want to move to the other location.
However to make moving easier I was thinking of buying 2 tower cases with hot swappable drive bays on the front and installing identical hardware in each one.
This would allow me to pull the drives out and just take them with me and plug them into the PC at the other location.
Would windows 7 complain? I'm not fussed about buying licenses for both PCs, but would I have any problems with drivers due to the different serial numbers of the components?
Update: 23rd Dec
So I went ahead with this and bought the 2 identical PCs and they are working beautifully, haven't had any problems when swapping drives. I've even upgraded the processor in one of them and not had any problems.
Best Answer
This is perfectly OK. We do it frequently.
Some points to bear in mind:
In general: After swapping let the PC boot once while keeping it off the LAN. You don't want the PC to pull Windows Updates or any software phoning home to check product activation at that point.
Any hardware differences will be resolved by the OS.
Then reboot and reconnect LAN and you are good to go.
Windows 7 is more lenient than XP in this situation anyway. (More build-in drivers.)
Also: Windows in general seems not to throw a fit if you visualize physical hardware to a VM. The other way around can be quite problematic, especially it the target hardware is different than the original hardware from which the VM was build (or the VM was build as such and never existed as physical hardware).