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#600
I just bought an HP desktop with a fresh install of Windows 7. It had a 400GB HDD and I replaced it with a 120GB Kingston SSD v300. Here's how I did it.
Step 0, create/burn a Windows 7 repair CD. Do that in Control Panel, Backup & Restore.
Step 1 (optional), clone the HDD with Clonezilla (in case you screw something up and have to start over).
Step 2, shrink the OS partition. My computer had a 100GB Restore partition and a 300GB OS partition. Using the built-in Windows 7 partition tool, shrink the OS partition/volume. I shrunk it to about 60GB. The exact value doesn't matter because later you're going to expand the partition when you install the SSD. I ignored the Restore partition because I did not put that on my SSD.
Step 3, Go to Control Panel, Backup & Restore and make a clone of the OS partition on an external USB HDD using Windows 7 built in backup software.
Step 4, replace the internal HDD with the SSD. The SSD is a 2.5" drive so I had to buy a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter mount bought on EBay for $7.
Step 5, Boot your computer from the Windows 7 Repair CD. One of the options is to restore your computer from an image. Choose the image that you burned onto your external USB HDD in step 3.
Step 6, go to Control Panel, Computer Administration, and resize the partition to fill up the entire space of your SSD.
There is also a 100MB partition thing that I don't understand but Windows takes care of that for you.
That's what I did and it worked perfectly! The computer is running 5x faster now.
Last edited by lkz8876; 31 Jul 2014 at 11:21.