How to Copy Your Windows Installation to an SSD
If you’re looking to upgrade your computer to a solid-state drive but don’t want to start everything back up from scratch, here’s how to transfer the data from your old hard drive.
These days, most new PCs ship with an internal solid-state drive installed. If you're still using a traditional spinning hard disk, you're missing out. Swapping in an SSD is one of the best upgrades you can make to speed up your computer. It'll boot faster, programs will launch instantly, and games will load quickly. You could always reinstall Windows from scratch—in many cases that may even be preferable. However, if you have the right tools, you can get your Windows machine up and running much sooner by copying the entire drive over to your new SSD. |Read more|
I've done it both ways. I've copied the entire drive, replaced the HDD with an SSD and then re-installed the operating system with all the programs and data. This is probably the fastest and best way to do it.
However, another time, the drive was messed up with portions of three different operating systems on it, so in this case, I didn't want to copy the mess to put on a new drive. I had to back up all of my important files. Then install the operating system, and re-install the software I wanted, and had used before. I had made a list of all the software I wanted to put on the new drive. Of course, this method takes a lot more time. Sometimes, you just don't have any other options.
