upgrade process

[James]

Hi
A friend has asked me to upgrade her drive to solid state, and upgrade her computer from W7 to W10.
What are the steps involved, software-wise? I've upgraded to W10, and have changed disks, but not both at the same time.
Do I need to start the upgrade (download to USB) then swap drives, then start upgrade from USB when installed? Or something else?
New drive is empty and she doesn't have any physical media for the old W7 system.
J

[88V8]

Personally I would never do two things at once. If it goes tits up, you don't know which went wrong.

Before changing drives, Bree has recommended taking a system image with Macrium. This can then be dropped onto the new drive.

When you are satisfied that the new drive is OK, you can upgrade to W10. There is a link in the Update section of the Control panel, and doubtless elsewhere.

V8

[Redmires]

I've just finished doing this myself tonight. Took about an hour or so. Download Macrium, attach the new drive via USB and clone the existing drive to the new drive. Worked like a dream.

[Breelander]

What are the steps involved, software-wise? I've upgraded to W10, and have changed disks, but not both at the same time.

Personally I would never do two things at once. If it goes tits up, you don't know which went wrong.

Before changing drives, Bree has recommended taking a system image with Macrium. This can then be dropped onto the new drive.

Agreed. Only attempt one step at a time. Macrium Reflect Free can be used to make an image of the existing Windows 7 to an external HDD before you start doing anything else. If it all goes wrong you can restore that and start over from the beginning.

I would recommend the next step to be upgrading the Windows 7 to Windows 10, before swapping the drives. Upgrade W7 while it still has the original drive. Once upgraded to Windows 10 check that it has activated, this should happen shortly after the upgrade. Once activated there will be a digital licence for this PC stored on the Microsoft activation servers and linked to the hardware ID of the PC. Crucially, in Windows 10 this hardware ID does not include the hard drive, so you can swap to the SSD without affecting the digital licence. I'm not sure how W7 handles activation and drive swaps, hence the recommendation to upgrade from W7 to W10 while it still has the original HDD.

Now make a Macrium image of the upgraded W10 system.

Does your friend have a lot of installed software she want to keep? If so, swap in the new SSD, boot from a Macrium restore usb, then restore the W10 image to the new drive. If it doesn't boot, the Macrium recovery usb has a 'fix windows boot problems' tool that will sort that out.

If she doesn't have need to keep any installed software, then you can just clean install the same edition of W10 as you got in the upgrade (Home or Pro) skipping entering a key when asked. It will activate automatically from the digital licence. Once Windows 10 is installed the old HDD could be put in an external usb case in order to copy over any user files to the new drive. Or you could install Macrium which can mount the image you made earlier as a virtual drive. You could copy the user files from that.

As it happens, I speak from experience. Last week I had an HDD start to fail on one of my W10 machines. I took a Macrium image, swapped out the failing HDD for a new SSD and restored the Macrium image to that. I'm typing this post from that very machine

[Breelander]

Have you chosen the SSD yet? You might want to read this first...

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