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Now, fire up EaseUs Todo Backup and select “Clone.” Identify your source disk (which will be the old hard drive) and the target location (which will be your new SSD). A quick format will do, which you can perform by just right-clicking the SSD in Windows Explorer and choosing Format.
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Also, if you’re using a laptop that doesn’t fit in both an SSD and a traditional hard drive at the same time, you’ll need an external adapter to hook your old hard drive with, but that’s highly optional and, again, will vary on a case-by-case basis.Īssuming that you have everything set up, make sure that you’ve formatted your SSD before making it a clone. It’s safer at this point that you completely remove the external hard drive that you backed up your data to from your computed. With everything else in place, all you need to make sure is that both your SSD and old hard drive are connected and powered up.
MIGRATING WINDOWS GRID WINDOWS 10
Migrating Windows 10 from Hard Disk to SSD Perform a defragmentation on your C: drive (usual location of Windows installation) and you’re good to go. Simply hit the Windows key on your keyboard and type “defrag” and then click the search result. That’s basically defragmenting your Windows 10 installation partition before you make the move. Once you’re done with the backup part, now you’re ready to prepare your Windows installation for the move. It’ll be time consuming but totally worth investing into. If you don’t have a backup mechanism set up already, either copy all your data over to the external hard drive or employ an online backup service like CrashPlan. While the process is mostly safe and doesn’t result in any unforeseen situations, you can’t ever be too safe. Essentially, you need to bring down the size of your Windows installation partition down to a level where it’s lesser than the total capacity of your target SSD. That includes any music, videos or photos you may have (those take usually the most space), as well as any other files that are not critical to your Windows installation (so stay away from the Windows and Program Files folders in most cases). For this reason, we’d recommend moving everything unnecessary from your user folder in your Windows 10 installation to an external hard drive. The cloning tool that we’ll use to migrate the installation takes everything with it, so in order for it to work, you’ll want to trim down the amount of data that you have on your hard drive. Normally, our computers can have GBs of data stored on their hard disks, or perhaps terabytes. To that end, a 128GB SSD should usually suffice in most cases, although it would vary from user to user. Ideally, you’ll want to invest in an SSD that can hold your Windows installation AND applications without worrying about personal files like videos, photos, music etc. You see, SSDs have inherently low storage capacities that traditional hard drives, and while there are larger capacities available, the pricing goes up exponentially. There are actually two parts to this preparation: preparing your data for migration and then preparing the current Windows 10 installation for the move. Of everything that you’ll end up doing in this process, this will be the most time-consuming step. You’ll need your old hard drive with the current Windows 10 installation in tact, your new SSD and a tool that will take care of the transfer (in this case, EaseUs Todo Backup Free), and optionally (but highly recommended), an external hard drive to backup your data and temporarily store files to (more on that in just a bit).
MIGRATING WINDOWS GRID UPGRADE
So if you’re planning to do this with, say, Windows 8.1 (please, please upgrade to Windows 10 - 8.1 is the worst you can have on your machine), you can still safely follow these steps.Īs far as what you’ll need to make a successful move from your old hard drive to an SSD, the list is fairly simple. It’s worth noting that while the guide is specifically for Windows 10, it applies to previous versions of Windows as well.
MIGRATING WINDOWS GRID HOW TO
Hence, in this article, we’ll show you how to upgrade your machine to a new SSD and take your current Windows 10 installation with you. These days, our PCs and laptops are pretty much an extension of our selves, and while we may be reluctant to admit that, it’s a pain to set up everything afresh. One challenge, should you decide to bite the bullet, remains that of your current Windows installation. However, it’s Windows, so yeah, it will slow down, and while there are numerous measures that you can take to tackle that, nothing beats upgrading to an SSD that will pretty much take care of all your such woes. With Windows 10, Microsoft has optimized the operating system enough that it doesn’t slow down easy.
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