cloned old drive to SSD, now microsoft office says "not activated"

[dipr]

cloned old drive to SSD, now microsoft office says "not activated"

hi new here, hope i'm posting in right section.

i got a crucial m4 SSD for my laptop, copied the old one using mini tool partition wizard - and now my 'microsoft office' is demanding a product key that i don't have any more. office works great on my old drive.

any clues for me? thanks.

ps my tech knowledge is near zero

 

[bbinnard]

Cloning a HDD to an SSD is a huge mistake - Win7 will not recognize the SSD as a "zero latency" device and will not use the TRIM function which is required to get optimum usage/performance from the SSD. Furthermore, your installation is probably not aligned properly on the SSD's segment boundaries, and this cause even more performance degradation.

What you need to do is do a clean install of Win7 on the SSD and then reinstall all your software. There is no way to get around doing this because the Windows installer senses the kind of drive it is installing on and then configures Windows appropriately.