Installation/Restoration of Windows 7 to New SSD

Hello all,
I'm making the plunge into SSDs and would like to know what the best way of installing a new one is, if I already have W7 installed on my current hard drive.
I've made a complete image using Acronis True Image that I was planning on restoring directly onto the SSD after removing my original hard drive, but I read that Windows 7 has to do some "alignment" of the SSD. If I simply restored the file, would that not occur?

Should I just do a fresh install and reinstall my other programs one by one?

There are quite a few features that W7 modifies or turns off/on when it knows it's running on an SSD. Whether these are turned on or off on the fly after an install I don't know and so would have to assume "No".

The surer bet would be to install fresh onto the SSD...

Absolutely fresh install. Apart from the alignment, when the Win7 installer determines that it is a disk with zero spin, it will modify all kinds of things in the system - e.g. :

Windows Indexing Service
System Restore
Windows Defrag
Use Large System Cache
Ntfs Memory Usage
Disable 8.3 Filenames
Disable Date Stamping
Disable Boot Tracing
Windows Prefetcher
Windows Superfetch

Ah, I see. Thanks for the heads up!

All that is done automatically, so I would just install as normal, correct?

Correct.

PS: what model SSD did you buy. Make sure the firmware supports "Trim". Win7 has Trim support, but it has to be supported by the SSD too. This is important to maintain the write speed over time. Only a few recent SSDs support that, so you have to watch out and possibly update the firmware (if an update is available).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM_(SSD_command)

whs said:

Correct.

PS: what model SSD did you buy. Make sure the firmware supports "Trim". Win7 has Trim support, but it has to be supported by the SSD too. This is important to maintain the write speed over time. Only a few recent SSDs support that, so you have to watch out and possibly update the firmware (if an update is available).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM_(SSD_command)

I grabbed the Gen 2 Intel X25M 80GB, so I think that supports TRIM.

As for disabling the other stuff, would that require any registry edits or just finding the right menu and unchecking some boxes?

I have the Gen 2 Intel X25M 80GB myself...it's a great drive. It will support TRIM...but there is going to be a firmware update from Intel to actually support that functionality. Intel is supposed to release around the same time that Win 7 releases. Oct 22.

ussj4brolli said:

whs said:

Absolutely fresh install. Apart from the alignment, when the Win7 installer determines that it is a disk with zero spin, it will modify all kinds of things in the system - e.g. :

Windows Indexing Service
System Restore
Windows Defrag
Use Large System Cache
Ntfs Memory Usage
Disable 8.3 Filenames
Disable Date Stamping
Disable Boot Tracing
Windows Prefetcher
Windows Superfetch

Please not that not all of those are disabled automatically. (maybe on some SSD on some installs, but not all the time)
Several posts determined this on forums. I installed 7 pro RTM on my OCZ Vertex and had to manually disable all of those.

Right, at the moment, not ll of the above are being disabled automatically. That's why I said "e.g." But maybe I did not make that clear enough. This article describes the current situation: Engineering Windows 7 : Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives If you want a full tweak, you can use this tweak utility that some friendly soul provided: Guide SSD Tweak Utility - OCZ Forum