Indeed, I'm just saying Windows 7 particularly seems to be more tolerant of hardware changes, to the point I've stuck the HDD in a totally different PC - AMD to Intel, AMD to Nvidia graphics, etc, and it didn't skip a beat, just asked for a reboot after starting up.
With Windows 2000 and XP, I used to uninstall the storage controller drivers before shutting down to remove the hard drive and swap it - it would then boot up with a generic IDE driver and behave a little better, sure cut down on some issues for me anyway.