Probably a stupid question, but I haven't bought a laptop in years. Wishing to upgrade my new laptop's 1TB 5200RPM to some sort of SSD, as really don't use much space. Do OEM windows keys have any legal or physical ability to be installed on a new drive? I could clone, but that wouldn't be optimised for an SSD. If I did clone and then went for a windows 8 upgrade (I know shoot me, for £15 I'm considering it), would that new install be SSD optimised I take it? Many thanks
Thanks, though the laptop only has one drive bay. So will most likely need to do it within my desktop I'm guessing, is that possible, or will it not like that? Do you do it from within windows, or get an install thing from microsoft's site and use your OEM key? Thanks
If you want to do a fresh build, then you just need to boot from the windows install media on your laptop with the new ssd installed in place of the hard drive. Then, you can transfer your data from the previous installation onto the new installation (might be worth getting a cheap external usb-sata enclosure.
Thanks, I get that. The bit I'm not sure on is can i create install media from what I've got and use the OEM key? As I'm sure the laptop won't come with a proper windows disc, right?
You can create a USB installer using Microsoft's own tool : http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool You should be able to use the OEM key with an OEM ISO, I'm not sure if you can use a Retail ISO and OEM key though - I think Microsoft merged the OEM/Retail media with Win7.
If you upgrade your computer to Windows 8, you'll have no problem (assuming your computer can run Windows 8 in the first place properly... what laptop do you have?)
This may or may not apply to you, but I recently upgraded my laptop from a 320gb drive to a Samsung 830 256gb SSD. I was doubtful that what I was going to try would work (it may not for you), but it did in fact work and thus saved me hours upon hours or reconfiguring my laptop. 1. Dismantled the laptop and removed the hard drive from it. 2. I used a spare desktop I had to connect both the old and the new drive to its mobo. I removed all other drives to avoid confusion. 3. I booted Gparted from a livecd on the desktop. 4. I shrunk the 320gb Partition down to 220gb. I was only using around 80gb, this will limit the size you can shrink it to. It will need to be shrunk to a size which can fit onto the destination SSD. 5. I copied the partition over onto the SSD. 6. Once complete I turned off the desktop and proceeded to install the SSD into the laptop. 7. I then booted into bios to check the ACHI options. There was none for the laptop I was using so I simply rebooted and logged into windows. 8. After logging in I was requested via elevated command prompt to enable trim and reboot. 9. After rebooting I checked that trim was definitely enabled and that windows had actually automatically updated this for me. It had If this doesn't there is plenty of information around of the web for this. 10. I then proceeded to run the Samsung SSD utility to create an optimization space on the SSD and to proceed with optimizing the hard drive. 11. I then ran some benchmark utilities to confirm that I was receiving the correct performance from the SSD. These came back as expected for the drive and the whole system performance also indicates it is operating as expected. Equipment Used: Appropriate Screw Driver / Tool for dismantling Laptop / Desktop. Sony Vaio T11. Samsung 830 256gb SSD. Space desktop PC with at least two sata ports and two sata power connectors. Gparted Live CD. Administrative privileges on the OS you are copying. I would still however recommend using a fresh install so long as you either don't have too many files / are happy to reconfigure the OS to your liking. I had not long ago spent ages configuring the laptop and so thought I'd give it a shot. The worst that could've happened is that I needed to wipe the SSD and perform fresh install.
actually Windows 8 Upgrade system is pretty good. All you have to do before yuo start the process: -> Uninstall your A/V and any other security software as this will block the Upgrade process. Disabling them isn't good enough. -> Uninstall any OC software (my personal recommendation) -> If you have USB 3.0, uninstall it's drivers (Windows 8 has USB 3.0 native support, so they aren't needed) -> Ensure that the current Windows with will be replaced has the latest updates.
With Win7 sometimes the key on the OEM sticker is useless, but there's plenty of programs that will grab the key for you (eg). Otherwise cloning with clonezilla (possibly shrinking the partition with GParted as davidbrown above explains) will work.
Actually if he has the OS disk that came with the system , then the copy of Windows is pre-activated ( I am not talking about the recover disks, OS disk. Recovery disk is an image so it's normal it's going to be activated). So if he re-installs he is good. And, he can use the product key on the stick, it will work, but a phone activation will be needed to activate the key, and make Windows activated and genuine
Have you considered just taking a windows system restore backup somewhere on a NAS or external disk and then when installing win7 again, you just restore that image. That takes care of the non-alignment problem and in general ( well in the last three cases I did an SSD move ) it did not prompt me for reactivation as changing just a HD swap is usually not enough to trigger that. You may need to shrink the system partition to be < than the SSD size though. Is very simple, dirt cheap and worked like a dream for me.
