Question about my computer's hard drive?

[proudcattle993]

I have a 4-year old laptop HP Pavilion DV7 that quit working out of the blue. You can hear it start up, but the screen stays black. I've tried hard resetting it a million times. It does not work. The computer had some structural damage too, where it stopped opening and closing easily until a piece popped off (I have two kids using it for homework). Maybe I shouldn't have done this, but I purchased the exact computer (a used one for a couple hundred bucks) so that I could just switch my hard drive out to avoid losing everything that was on the other computer. So that's my background, but here are my questions.

1. The original computer's caps lock light is blinking one time intermittently. I read in HP's code list that this means the CPU is bad, which is probably why my screen is black. If so, does that affect my hard drive?

2. What if I install the hard drive in the replacement computer? Will everything be on there including printers and drivers I've downloaded? My understanding is that it will be my computer just in a different "shell"

3. The replacement computer I bought won't connect to the internet as is, even though I know it should. A network driver is uninstalled, and I can't detect any networks to connect to, so I can't go online and install it. So I'm hoping that by installing my other hard drive, that issue will be fixed. If not, there's no point in doing it. My wireless connection is working fine on all the other devices in the house.