Guild Wars 2

So I had a laptop running win 7 that died. I have salvaged the hdd and my new rig is due for delivery today. I know that a simply copy paste to the new hdd will run, but is there a way to run the gw2 setup/install to make sure the files are correctly installed to the new hdd?
Or would it be better to just do a clean install?

It is better to do a clean install.

When I bought SSD, I moved my Win7 from old HD to SSD and then updated to Win10, for some reason GW2 didn’t work.
Then I simply made a clean Win 10 install on SSD and copied the GW2 files from old HD, everything is running perfectly ever since.

If you’re asking whether to copy paste or clean install GW2, the answer is copy paste. The only two files GW2 needs to run are gw2.exe and gw2.dat, neither of which will be any different depending on your OS. Resintalling might slim your gw2.dat down a little bit since it gets rid of any old data the game doesn’t use anymore, but it’s not really necessary.

You can move the Guildwars2 folder all over the place, the main problem is it’s size.

Everything you need is in the folder – except passwords and IDs, they are stored in your user folders.

GW2 is easier to copy than many programs because it’s all in 1 folder and the only thing you really need to save is the .dat (you need the .exe too but you can download that very quickly).

But I would say it depends on your internet connection – whether it’s fast enough to download the game in a reasonable amount of time and whether it’s capped and a 20GB+ download will eat up all of your allowance for the week/month. If one or both of those is likely to be an issue then it’d be better to copy it over. If not then re-download it.

When I rebuilt my computer I decided to re-download it simply because I already had enough hassle making sure I’d backed up all the irreplaceable stuff, anything on CD and anything I could download I decided I’d rather reinstall from scratch, but then I have pretty fast and uncapped internet.