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Looking for experiences & guidance on cloning current HDD to SSD
Hi
I am running Windows 7 Pro on a Sony Vaio S-series laptop. The laptop has one Toshiba 320GB HDD, showing as 290GB C: drive, and 8GB recovery partition and 100MB system reserved partition. Used space is only 62GB at the moment.
The laptop is 3 years old & I'm looking to extend its life by replacing the HDD with an SSD (crucial M4 or similar) of 256GB size. I've done some research but not got a clear impression of a simple & reliable way to go about this. I want to simply clone the existing system onto the new SSD.
So... I guess I need to make sure that I get the partitions down to below 256GB to start, then... what? What experiences can forum members share, what recommendations (eg cloning SW, strategy (eg Acronis says best to put the SSD in its final location, with the source HDD attached via USB etc... seems a faff - why is that 'best'?), hints, problems to watch out for etc...) or even a tutorial I may not have seen...
I appreciate that some may recommend a re-install but I'd rather not do that (with the attendant re-installs, configuring etc) so would rather clone the current system reliably.
Thanks!