Replacing my C drive with a SSD in windows 7

Mark is right--that's pretty much what Macrium is designed to do.

Shouldn't take over 30 minutes.

I assume you have some sort of boot disk you made with Macrium. You will need to boot from it after first connecting the new SSD and disconnecting the old 500 GB drive. Navigate within the boot environment and find the image file you have on that other drive. Select it and restore it to the new SSD.

If you haven't made the boot disc, you need to do that first and then confirm that it is in fact bootable.

You shouldn't have to first format the SSD. I assume it is large enough to accept your image file from the old HD.

The restoration will of course take you back to the point in time at which the image file was made. If that was months ago, and your system has changed noticeably since then (new programs installed, etc), you might want to make a new image file so that the restoration will match how your system is NOW, not how it was THEN, months ago.

See comments in bold.

trendy said:

The C drive I got now id a 500gb Sata now if I decide to go for the ssd should I be looking out for something that is compatable with the sata cables that are in place now?

Yes. If your current 500 GB drive is SATA, those cables should be compatible with a new SSD.

Yes I do have a disc that was made during the macrium backup.

Was that disc made using the "Linux" method or using the "Win PE" method?

Either should work, but you should find out right now if that disk will boot your PC. If it won't, you are in trouble.

Regarding the fitting of the new ssd into the tower,Then startup pc and placing the disc into the optical drive what will come on screen so that I can select to boot from the disc that was made by macrium the backup is on a seperate external hdd.

You would put the disc in the CD drive and restart the computer.

You will then need to use an F key to choose your CD drive as the drive to boot from for that one time only. It might be F12, F8, or F2. It varies. Tap that key repeatedly during the restart. You should see a menu that asks if you want to boot from your hard drive or from the CD drive. Choose CD with your arrow keys.

If you used the Linux method, the startup will be pretty slow and what you see on screen will not be very familiar to you. You will see text with basic instructions. You would use your keyboard to locate the image file you made and choose the new SSD as the location for the restore.

If you used the Win PE method, you should see something that looks like Windows, quite familiar to you.

I'd confirm that disc is bootable immediately, before doing anything else.

trendy said:

And how would I confirm that the disc is bootable??

Try to boot with it per my previous instructions. There's no other way.

If you see the menu to boot from the CD, and you choose it, and the PC boots, you'll know it's bootable because the PC won't be booting from the hard drive because you told it to boot from the CD drive.

As I recall, you should land at the Macrium interface, where you would then make the choice to restore your image.

You should have done this 5 minutes after making that CD. Otherwise, you were falsely believing you had some protection.

If it boots from the CD and you land at the Macrium interface, you know it's OK and you can then just remove the disc from the CD drive without going further. Then do an ordinary reboot to get back to Windows on your hard drive.

That's a good SSD. I'd probably get it or a Samsung 840 EVO, whichever is cheaper or maybe had the better warranty.

You aren't likely to be able to tell them apart once installed. Both much much faster than a regular HDD.

Does that disk boot?