Installing a new hard drive

[NorthCyd]

Looking for some advice. I purchased a new SSD for my laptop and was wondering how best to set it up. I know cloning is the easiest, but I've read that doing a clean install of windows and moving backups of files over will give you the best performance. My laptop is getting fairly old and there is definitely some bloatware I would like to get rid of. If I am installing Windows 10 will it pretty much install itself including drivers if I use a recovery file? Does anybody know of a good faq they would recommend for this? I've looked at a few but someone out there may know of better ones than I've seen.

 

[keepngoal]

my preference is a clean install... so much is cloud based and backup data is easy.

performance is best this way too. good luck!

 

[DSMCy]

Looking for some advice. I purchased a new SSD for my laptop and was wondering how best to set it up. I know cloning is the easiest, but I've read that doing a clean install of windows and moving backups of files over will give you the best performance. My laptop is getting fairly old and there is definitely some bloatware I would like to get rid of. If I am installing Windows 10 will it pretty much install itself including drivers if I use a recovery file? Does anybody know of a good faq they would recommend for this? I've looked at a few but someone out there may know of better ones than I've seen.

Others will probably be more helpful, and it's been a while since I've done a clean install, but the Windows install should be fairly easy. It should walk you through everything.

I'd recommend downloading a few drivers to a flash drive, especially your wireless and/or ethernet drivers. Just in case you have problems and can't access the internet.
Once you're set up you can download any drivers that don't install from Windows.

 

[NorthCyd]

Got my new SSD installed with a clean install of windows. It was pretty easy, and holy cow does an SSD make a HUGE difference. My laptop would take 2 or 3 minutes to boot up and was constantly bogging down. Now it boots up in under 30 seconds. I have an aging gaming laptop, and I was surprised to find it's even provided a boost in game performance, which I wasn't expecting. Probably just clearing out all the bloatware and other crap it had accumulated over the years. Definitely worth the $100 investment.