I have a sony vaio laptop vgn-s5hp I have used my tower to install windows 7 to a hard drive and then put it in the laptop but now the laptop won't find the windows on the hard drive have I done something wrong. The laptop in question has has a hard drive on it from another one with windows 10 and worked ok but slow so I pressume 7 isn't to advance for it

You can't really do this. You must install Windows 7 directly onto the laptop.

On installation Windows is greatly customised to the machine it is installed on, transferring the hard drive to another machine usually gets Windows bootable of sorts but it is luck of the draw and at best will have a lot of problems visible or not.

From the sound of it you may not have "installed" windows onto the hard drive but file-copied it across, that would not make the drive bootable into windows.

Then you also have problem with the Windows authentication (licence) which is against the physical hardware of the computer.