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Here's one for the computer boffins.
I have a portable hard drive caddy, and a solid state drive to go into it.
What's the most reliable way to clone the HDD in a laptop to the SSD so that I can just swap the two over and get laptop up and running using the SSD rather than the old HDD?
I recently reinstalled the Win10 on the laptop, and that has breathed a new lease of life into it.
One point of concern is that the current drive is 500Gb, but virtually empty, and the SSD is only 128Gb.
Tbh unless you’ve got software you can’t download again for some reason it’s far easier to install windows on the SSD afresh and transfer the data with your caddy afterwards.
Win10 will likely auto-activate even if it was previously win7 or 8.
If you must clone then you’ll need EaseUS.
I recently tried a few but it was EaseUS (free) that worked perfectly transferring to SSDs on a couple of PCs.
Win10 will likely auto-activate even if it was previously win7 or 8.
It'll auto-activate if it was W8.1 or W10. Windows 7, you'll have to feed it the OEM key an the sticker on the laptop. So in this case, it'll be fine.
If you must clone then you’ll need EaseUS.
There's any number of cloning options. EaseUS is as good as any.
Done about 4 PC's by cloning the drive using a caddy and then swapping over. Try and go a bit bigger than 128mb though.
Many SSD manufacturers provide cloning software. Some will resize partitions down.
I've done smaller SSD than HD a couple of times but that's on desktops where I keep the old HDD for data. Uninstall and clean up stuff to get it down to size then clone. I keep most data within Onedrive, so can just remove that and set it up again on the HDD. Though backup and restore saves on redownloading. Another option is with Win 10 you can now have OneDrive keep stuff online and only download when needed which saves a lot of local space.
However, 128gb is pretty small for OS drive. Then again I get away with 64gb on my Win 10 tablet. Doesn't have much installed though.
250gb SSD can be had for £30ish of a decent brand.
The laptop in question has very little installed on it already (around 26Gb in total OS and other files), and all the data it uses is in OneDrive or external drives.
Just so I get this right:
I create a recovery drive with Win10 (already done this BTW), then pop the blank SSD in the laptop and reboot/reinstall the Win10 OS using the recovery drive? Curren Win10 is all activated and updated to the latest version.
Sounds rather simple... too simple.
The laptop is my duaghters old one from Uni, which seemed to die of nothing more than oldness. Once we reinstalled the Win10 it has rejuvenated itself marvellously. I'd just like to use the SSD to pep it up a bit more. She has since treated herself to a new Asus ultrabook thing which is SSD, and it's a fantastically speedy and quiet machine.