So I dug out a slightly newer laptop and decided to just swap the hard drive and see what happened.
Went from HP EliteBook 8540w to an HP ProBook 6470b and the only issue was I had to re-enter my wifi password.
Outside of puppy, the ProBook has a slightly smaller keyboard that pisses me off when I switch because fingers have to get used to moving less distance lol
I tried similar in the past with other distros and some had major issues. Puppy did great,