Laptop drives/ram/possibly OS upgrade advice needed please

My Dell Inspiron 17R N7010 is getting a bit tired now although it’s clean and tidy bugs wise and runs fine if a little slowly for me. A friend said it can help a lot if you put more RAM in and as big a hard drive that it can sensibly take.

So I did a little research and splurged out on 2 x 4GB RAM cards and a 750GB hybrid SSD/SATA drive. The tools I have for the purpose of changing things over are (not all may be relevant, this is part of why I ask) are HD Clone 4.3 Standard Edition, Belarc (so I have all of my software keys) and MiniTool Partition wizard (probably unnecessary), plus a very cheap external 2.5” disc enclosure. Not sure what else I might need or what built in Windows software would also be useful.

I’m on Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64bit, although I did buy Windows 7 Ultimate disc and COA on Ebay recently (OEM) thinking of using it on a refurbed but as yet unused desktop I bought a year or so ago on Amazon, which also has Windows Home Premium 64 bit on it at the moment. So my questions are twofold really – the Windows Ultimate won’t get used to its full capability on the desktop so I wondered if in making the laptop upgrade I could also change the Windows edition at the same time?

I am not technical so any help would need to be in very plain English – jargon goes straight over my head.

First off, I don’t want to lose use of the laptop for any longer than a day or so at most, so is it possible to clone its hard drive to the hybrid whilst still using it, then do a final backup and system repair disc just before the changeover. I’m thinking that if it is possible to continue using the laptop whilst cloning (HD Clone is slow but it’s simple to use and I’m familiar with it), I could then just swap over the drive, change the RAM and then apply that final backup to bring everything up to date on the new drive. System repair disc being there as a precaution hopefully.

Help and advice will be very much appreciated – at the moment I don’t know if what my ideal solution as described is even practical/possible.

System info: (This is from Belarc, I couldn't get the system info from the bit of software provided here to copy into this thread, sorry). If it's insufficient, tell me what else is needed please.

Windows 7 Home Premium (x64) Service Pack 1 (build 7601)
Install Language: English (United States)
System Locale: English (United Kingdom)
Installed: 07/11/2010 12:16:49
Processor a
2.40 gigahertz Intel Core i3 M 370
64 kilobyte primary memory cache
256 kilobyte secondary memory cache
3072 kilobyte tertiary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (2 total)
Hyper-threaded (4 total)

Thank you Sandeep for your speedy response; I only had the briefest time to view it yesterday evening so am not so prompt in responding myself, sorry. However, your suggestions are (at least to me) not practical - and in respect of partitioning, frightening!

Drive cost £82.00: Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB,Internal,7200 RPM,2.5" (ST750LX003) Hybrid hard drive.
2 x 4GB RAM cost £43.00: 8GB Crucial Matched Pair (2 x 4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800 (CT51264BF160B).
Other (HD Clone, 2.5 inch disc enclosure) costs total was maximum £45.00.
Total: £170.00 – I don’t think I’d get a new laptop for this kind of price.

The very reason I want to upgrade the laptop itself is that I like it. In the (nearly) three years I’ve had it performance has been excellent, it’s never crashed in spite of the frequent heavy use and I’ve never had a major problem with it.

I read some poor reviews as to its overall performance but all I can say is that I must have been lucky and got the ‘perfect’ one – it’s probably also relevant to say that I’m not a gamer. The IT men where I worked at the time also gave it a tweak or two plus put some useful software on it which I believe must have contributed to its longevity, not that I think 3 years is old – even in today’s lightning speed terms.

I’m retired now, and therefore need to keep an eye on expenses – so the ram and drive upgrade seems like the best option to me. As you say, the RAM change is simple – it’s the main drive and potential os change that I need help and advice on.

Your suggestion to partition the hard drive makes me nervous - as I said I’m not technical, in fact I’m fairly good at doing things the wrong way the first time and even the second time on occasions. I can easily see my wiping part or all of the drive, which would be very problematic. But it did give me an idea – would cloning the just the recovery partition from the laptop to the new hybrid drive do the same job?

HD Clone does this quite straightforwardly. Then swap the drives and back up the new hybrid drive from a normal back up (which in my case is done on a 500GB external usb drive). I do a full normal Windows backup on a daily basis anyway (had to do a restore just once and lost a week’s worth of input, never again). A system repair disc is also done anytime I get updates or change/add/remove software (which is fairly often)

Also I still need some advice regarding the two main issues:

1) Can I use the laptop as normal whilst cloning its drive, whether that be the C: drive or the recovery partition?
2) Can I upgrade the operating system to Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit at some point during the changeover – if so when and in what order should each operation be done?

It also occurs to me that I may lose the .NET framework, or will that carry over?

Thank you, you gave me more things to think about – feasible or not. Looking forward to further contributions from both you and other members, I really want to get this solved.

And I just noticed that my basic system info has appeared in the bottom left hand corner, good!

SandeepP said:

Hi b52,

And regarding upgrading the harddrive I understand your fear about migrating the data. To tell you honestly I have not used HD clone so would not have alot of information regarding the same.

Maybe some other user with more information regarding this software would be able to answer for you. I use ease us backup which you can download here:

EaseUS Todo Backup Free - Free download and software reviews - CNET Download.com

You can make a complete image backup of the system on external drive. And then make that external harddrive bootable so you can boot from it.

Once you booted from the external harddrive then you can load the backed up image on the new harddrive.

Check these links for more information:

Free Windows backup software with funtion to backup drive and partition helps you backup system in case of system crash.

I understand I might have not answered all your questions. However, I have tried to provide you an alternative which is tested and worked for me.

There are many users who would have information regarding this software would be able to post more advices.

If you have any further queries, please feel free to contact us.

That's very informative Sandeep, thank you - and the manual is extremely useful. I do have one but it's not as detailed, although I must admit that I've also found a few Youtube videos to be visually helpful!

Is there any reason why I can't clone direct to the new replacement drive?

I have used HD Clone before on a 2 TB external drive so I know where I am with it and that I can trust it, because the loss of that data would have been a disaster.

Now I just need to know if I can clone whilst the existing drive is being used, and whether I can get the Windows OS upgrade done at some point during the process also (or even afterwards, any help appreciated).

Once again, thank you for continuing to assist however you are able.

All versions of Win7 are the exact same OS but with a few hidden expensive features unlocked in the higher versions. So that isn't germane to your problem.

Make sure you have a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7. Note how drivers are handled, the tools and methods which work best for Win7. Read also the Note for Dell Owners at the end. Ask back any questions.

Win7 will never hang or bog and is instantaneous on adequate hardware with that perfect install.

Info for Sandeep first:

I would have the new drive in a disc enclosure connected to the laptop via usb2.

Regarding backups, as posted previously I already do a full Windows backup (including system image) daily to a 500 GB external hard drive. I also create new System repair disc (using CD-RW to save on discs!) whenever updates are installed or I change software. One or the other of these is fairly frequent so the last one done was yesterday.

Re disc usage and partitions, they say a picture is worth a thousand words so here goes:





Hope these are useful.

Happy news received late yesterday from HD Clone (Miray), which may be of interest to anyone cloning an active (i.e. in use) drive (my mail is first, then their reply):

“Dear Miray Customer Service

I have purchased a new larger hybrid SSD/SATA drive for my laptop and am planning to clone the laptop drive to it as soon as possible with HD Clone – the laptop drive is getting old and showing signs of wearing out and I need a bigger drive for the future.

It is probably a stupid question, but is there a way I can continue to use the laptop during the cloning process, then swapping the drives and updating the newly installed hybrid drive with a final backup of the old drive – created after the clone process is complete?

I would appreciate any advice about this and any other possible problems with cloning an active drive. I do not want to lose use of the laptop for any length of time – just for information the used space on it is 103.00 GB (of a total of 500 GB) and the new hybrid drive has 750.00 GB capacity. I will also be putting more RAM memory in to optimise performance.

If you require any further information please ask, and thank you in advance for any help and advice you can give – I have HD Clone standard version.

Kind regards,”


Answer from HD Clone (Miray) 09/09/13

“With HDClone you can do a clone of the current system, it will have all the data from the original disk at the time you started the cloning, i.e. if you start the cloning at a time A, and delete some files later on, or create/modify files after the start, the clone will have only the files from the time A. This is possible because it takes a snapshot at the beginning of the clone process.

If you work on some files, you can then copy them over to the new system after the clone has finished. If you don't know what files have changed in the time in between, it's more complicated, as HDClone won't be able to help you with that. You probably need a tool that looks at all the ‘last-modified’-dates of the files and copies those who are newer than a special timestamp.

If you have 100GB of data to copy, and clone them over a (slow) USB connection, it will take about 1½ hours (if you're using HDClone Standard or Higher). Basic or Free Edition will copy the total 500GB, which takes of course 5× as long.”


Looks like the cloning process can be done while still using the drive, and is reasonably painless in terms of time anyway as I have HDClone Standard version.


gregrocker - I will look at your link before posting back, thank you.