Help - Sony Vaio re-install MS Home premium after SSD HD replacement.

Hi folks,

My dear old reliable Sony Vaio Hard disc is on it's way out. I bought a new 500 gig SSD from Best Buy and I need to replace the HD asap. I do have a 3 disc Sony Vaio recovery disc set that I made when I bought the Laptop originally. I just wanted to ask someone here if they would be so kind to give me some help on doing this job. My system is Windows 7 home premium 64bit. Intel I5 2.40GHz 4gb RAM. This laptop has been a champ for many years but I am now getting a warning that the HD is going to fail soon. I have copied all of my data to a external hard drive already. I would really appreciate if someone would list a step by step process for me that I can print out before I begin the hard drive replacement. My common sense tells me that I just need to shut down the PC, replace the HD and then boot from the 3 disc set that I labeled "Vaio Recovery Windows 7 64bit". I assume that the recovery disc's will format the new HD and do a fresh install of the original system but I really wanted to make sure.
P.S.
Since Sony Vaio's are no longer on the market I believe.... is it possible to just install Windows 7 Home premium without all of the additional Vaio software? I just thought I would toss this out there. I do have the product key on a sticker on the bottom of the laptop. The Vaio software only had one utility that I used which was the disc/registry defrag. As far as the other stuff it seems that the Vaio software really slows down the startup time. The original system also came with Norton but I just used the Norton removal tool and then installed Avast which I am very happy with. I paid for Avast premium with also their system cleanup utility and I have always loved it.

Sincerely,

Mike

Welcome to the forum. is the key a OEM or retail? Using the disk is the safest as it will have all the drivers a clean dvdmay not have drivers the only problem is that it will way behind with updates and you may get 1,000 updates. If the original was a standard hd you may need to change some settings if 7 doesnt detect the fact its an ssd

A little more specific....

I'm not sure if the key is OEM or retail. If I look in the system it is listed there and the key on the sticker that is stuck to the bottom of the laptop matches the one within the specifications of the system itself. To elaborate a little ... when I first was notified of soon to be doom I began moving everything important off of the laptop to a external hard drive. The laptop itself has had many crashes in the past that a simple re-start has fixed short term. Then about two weeks ago there was a driver update by Microsoft itself which I didn't give second thought to. That being said ... On my restart windows said the disc needed to be checked for consistency but when disc check began to run it warned that a recent update caused a problem and disc check could not complete. It suggested a system restore but when I tried that system restore could not find any restore points before the update. I pretty much thought at that time that my disc was completely doomed. I could only get windows to start in safe mode after that. So I said what the hell ... let's use the three disc rescue approach and see what happens. When I put the first disc in it right out of the gate reformatted the HD and then went through a fresh install of windows 7 home premium. It took hours for windows to download all of the updates from MS but it all went well.To be honest I'm using the laptop right now to explore this forum and the laptop is working fine but on every restart it still warns me of a HD issue so I think it is just a matter of time before the disc fails. This is why I went out and bought a new SDD. I don't want to start installing all of my .exe programs that I have saved on my external hard drive until I know that I am doing so on a new HD with a fresh install. I also made a system image but who knows if it is not corrupt in some way because of the HD issue. I'm not a super tech guy folks. I just love windows 7 because I am so used to it and I don't use the laptop for much other than MS office, web browsing, editing my videos with filmora screen and watching netfilx when I'm on the road. I just don't want to give up the laptop because it cost me $1400.00 about 6 years ago. Yeah I know ..... It's about time but I really can't afford another one right now because I just lost my job after 34 years at the same company. So I have the Vaio recovery disc set and a new SSD. I don't care how long windows updates take I have the time. I can download any utilities you guys may suggest. I have about 6 or so blank DVD's still.
Oh...btw.... When I go to the sony site they say they don't offer any more support since they no longer make laptops. Isn't that just wonderful

We need to be clear there are 2 type of disk errors one is the file system which chkdsk can fix in that case the disk is fine its just the file system . The second is the bad sectors that is a disk starting to die and cant be fixed.
So if your drive is only getting chkdsk errors the disk is ok. Goto the disk maker website and they normally have a test program which will tel you if the disk is ok or has bad sectors so you know what type of error you have.
An SSD will speed up you system and specially Filmora a 480 gig SSD is now £50 .What version of Filmora are you running old 8 or the new 9 or pro which is like Adobe

Update. CHKDSK found 8 bad clusters.

Its the disk makers website which has the test is Seagate