Just bought a new Win 10 laptop with an SSD. Compared to my 3 year old PC of similar spec, which uses a HDD the boot up time is seconds rather than minutes. If I got an internal SSD for the PC and used the 1tb disc for storage would I be seeing the same sort of performance?

How easy is it to move the OS onto another disc? The OS was pre-installed on my PC.

Yes and dead easy, just need a USB to hard drive cable,about £7. If you want a massive improvement also do a fresh Windows install. Did this to my lads 5 month old Dell laptop, went from almost unuseable to pretty decent when the bloatware was gone and an SSD installed. Samsung do their own cloning software for their SSDs but there are loads of free applications out there.

I’ve done the Windows 10 fresh install and SDD upgrade on 3 laptops and a desktop, all have improved significantly including one which was an Upgrade from Vista, didn’t even bother with a licence key for that, Windows seems to work fine without one, just a little watermark on screen.

Not too hard – you could just copy the windows partition onto the new drive and set it to boot from there instead.

My PC now has two SSDs – boots in about 10 seconds.

If I got an internal SSD for the PC and used the 1tb disc for storage would I be seeing the same sort of performance?

Yes. I just did this (with an old laptop) and I went down the cloning route instead of a new install. I used a disk cloning utility. Oh and the 256Gb SSD was like £25.

I’ve just bought a new desktop with win 10 on hdd and am planning to use an m.2 nvme drive, with a fresh win10 install from usb. Then use the hdd for storage. This may or may not be the best solution; many people on here know far more about this than me. A scan of your pc on the Crucial website may give you a good idea of what’s possible.

Yes, it will make a big difference. You could try cloning the old disk. If you have all the installation media for your apps, a fresh installation of Windows is preferable. You can make a bootable Windows USB installation drive from the Microsoft website.

An SSD and fresh install transforms and older computer. For 50-100quid it should be an option for an awful lot of people.

We have a bank of old laptops at work that have old 250gb standard HDDs. I suggested, instead of buying a new fleet of 50+ whole laptops, they extend them by a few years with SSDs but they just decided to spend the cash. Not my problem!

Boot-up speed will definitely improve (although I never fully shut down my desktop so it’s not such a big deal), whether apps will depends a lot on where they’re located and if you have enough RAM (to limit paging – assuming you don’t move the pagefile to HDD anyway).

For 50-100quid

£20 for a 120Gb Crucial on Amazon, which is a bit small, but £24 for a 240Gb. Insanely cheap for the performance boost it offers.

My laptop is all SSD with no HDD. Not a lot of storage but I don’t need storage on the device and everything runs really fast, boot up in 10 seconds etc,. and always has done for the last 7 years with no slowdown from new in 2013.

I’ve just upgraded an old Dell laptop, has a Windows Vista sticker on it and a serial connector!
Small SDD for about £25, Windows 10 via 7 and 8, now a perfectly good laptop I use in the garage to drive a 3d printer.

Could someone do a dummy’s guide to the steps involved? I’m guessing external ssd – install fresh W10 that you’ve already downloaded onto a usb stick (or new ssd? Set PC to boot off that? point at original Hdd for data? Remove old Windows files from Hdd?

So worth it. Picked up an ex-corporate Dell micro pc to run as a pc plugged into my work display: not a massive SSD but all I really want it for is browsing the web (keeping open a ridiculous amount of tabs for ‘later’) and office apps. Just have a button to swap the mouse/keyboard/display between the work pc and home pc. Its brilliant… its tiny, boots in seconds, is quiet and runs flawlessly.

Cloning is quite easy. I bought a usb HDD enclosure as we re-used some of the old 2.5 HD’s from the laptops as portable storage.

Pop ssd in ‘caddy’, plug into usb. Download a free cloning software, tell it to do the job. All copied over, shut down laptop, swap drives, press go.

Helps if your machine isn’t full of crap, but cloning is the quickest way if you aren’t sure about a fresh install. All our machines are SSD.

Even swapped my big 17″ laptop over in hospital – colleagues had bought me a load of amazon vouchers so I used it to buy a 1TB SSD and cloned it, then swapped over (laptop now has 1TB SSD and 1TB HDD in it. Simple enough to do drugged up on morphine with a broken spine (I had nothing else to do for 6 weeks).

Could someone do a dummy’s guide to the steps involved?

Go to this Microsoft page and follow the “Create Installation Media” link:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

That should give you a bootable USB drive. Install the new SSD and leave the old HDD in place. Set the BIOS (or whatever it’s called now) to boot from the USB drive. When you boot the machine, it should start the Windows installation process. Just follow the instructions there. It should format the SSD and install Windows. Just make absolutely sure you select the SSD, not the old HDD. This should set up a new copy of Windows, but when you boot up, it will let you boot to the old version if needed.

Then, you need to reinstall all your apps and get your data imported. You may not be able to access all the files on your old HDD for security purposes (i.e. to stop someone stealing the HDD and just copying the files). In that case, boot to the old Windows installation and resize the partition that contains Windows to as small as you can make it.

https://www.easeus.com/partition-master/shrink-windows-10-partition.html

Then, create a new partition using the empty space. Set your “My Documents” folder to be in that partition. This will export your data to the new partition, but you need to make sure that everything you want to access is in the “My Documents” folder.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/310746/configuration-of-the-my-documents-folder

Then, reboot to the new Windows installation and set the “My Documents” location to be the folder on the new partition. This should let you access everything from the new OS.

It’s a really good idea to back everything up to an external HDD before you start (or Dropbox, etc.). If things go wrong, you really want to have all your data backed up somewhere else.

^^ That’s good advice on the whole, but “backups” should be the first line not the last one. “Recover data from backups” should be something you can always do for anything you value, not an afterthought when contemplating drive transplants. (I wouldn’t screw about with separate partitions either, there’s no point any more.)

You can clone the existing drive. You’d need some means of connecting it up (less of an issue in a desktop) and obviously it’d have to fit, you can’t move half a gig of data onto a 240GB drive.

Honestly though, I’d avoid it if possible. It’s a good opportunity to clean up all the preinstalled OEM guff and start again from clean. Worst case scenario is you just just throw the old drive back in to revert. If you’re planning on mounting the old drive as a data drive you could then just redirect your documents folders to it. Whether you’d want to rather than move / copy them to the SSD would again depend on space requirements. If you log in to the PC with an MS account before and after then you should avoid any permissions issues as it’s the same user.

I’ve just bought a new desktop with win 10 on hdd and am planning to use an m.2 nvme drive, with a fresh win10 install from usb.

This is the best option, if your system supports it.

“backups” should be the first line not the last one. “Recover data from backups” should be something you can always do for anything you value, not an afterthought when contemplating drive transplants

Yes, it should, but…

If you log in to the PC with an MS account before and after then you should avoid any permissions issues as it’s the same user.

Yes, but a lot of people refuse to use MS accounts because they don’t want Bill Gates snooping around their holiday photos.

thols2

Yes, but a lot of people refuse to use MS accounts because they don’t want Bill Gates snooping around their holiday photos.

Why not? Seems like a nice gentleman and of course I’ll show my holiday photos to anyone willing to listen. As for Ballmer, jumping around and screaming in my neighbourhood, no thanks.
Larry is holding my data in data centers too, I really don’t trust that dude who even looks like a villain from Die Hard. Jeff is snooping my shopping bag, what a shady chararacter as well.

Cougar
Full Member

Honestly though, I’d avoid it if possible. It’s a good opportunity to clean up all the preinstalled OEM guff and start again from clean. Worst case scenario is you just just throw the old drive back in to revert.

Yah, this. I don’t know why I didn’t realise this was an option for so long- I really dislike doing new windows installs, it always finds some way to **** me over but it’s a no-risk thing