Bought a new desktop Pc and SSD now for the move ?

Happychappy

Hi

I have finally bought a new desktop Pc to replace my ageing Dell Inspiron 530, I use the computer for internet browsing, office based work and little website design and photos etc, no gaming.

The computer I have bought is a http://support.hp.com/in-en/document/c04715474
I have also bought separately, a SanDisk 240gb SSD which I need to fit

I have a fair numbers of programs on my PC, including Rosetta Stone, Photoshop, Dreammaker all fairly old, but still good, I dont have all the discs as these were downloaded directly from Adobe etc, therefore I need to move the whole lot over to my new PC

The pc comes wth a 1TB Hard drive which is fine for storing photos etc, but I want the SSD to store my documents and Office, I currently have office 2013, but can download 2016 for £10 through a work related discount?

How should I go about the move, I currently have Acronis True Image 2013, do I first fit the SSD drive into the new computer which comes with Windows 8, I currently have Windows 7 and the activation for Windows 10, but this expires in a few days, so should I upgrade my current computer to windows 10 before starting the move?

My Inspiron is a few years old and very slow clearly suffering clutter, I regularly check with antimalwarebytes, Spybot, Windows defender, Avast and CCleaner but if I image the whole thing, will this slow down the new PC ?

Any advice on the simplest way to configure this please and the cabling set up to add my SSD to the new pc would be gratefuly received. I was going to add the SSD to my old computer last year, but hung on till I bought a new PC, and now the time has come :eek:

NiftyDigits

Had you maxed out the upgrades for the Inspiron? Dependent on the Motherboard, you can get up to 8GB of RAM in there, as a cost of no more than £32. 240GB SSD from around £50.

There should be no issue from clutter....other than your installing four antivirus/antimalware programs unnecessarily.

But since you have already taken the plunge and purchased the HP from Argos.... don't expect to clone the drive and pop the result into the HP. Nothing will work as you expect.
Look here for the why.
The amount of time you'll spend getting it up and running would be better spent running a clean install of everything.
As to your programs, look for the old application downloads online and back up activation and products keys.

jshm2

The "dirty" way of doing it is to simply buy a SATA to USB cable. Plug your SSD into your old machine and clone the drive over. using clonezilla

Then swap the SSD with your existing drive and then reinstall all the drivers. Windows 7 is quite tolerant and packs a lot more drivers than it needs. While not perfect it should catch most of the drivers you need to at least boot. Then you go about manually installing the drivers.

However the proper way of doing it, is with a clean install of Windows 7 onto your new SSD drive. Simply run Magic Jelly Bean on your old machine to get your Windows, Photoshop etc licence keys to transfer onto your new machine.

googler

You've done it backwards to the way I would recommend.

You've got an HDD with the operating system, and you're adding an SSD as a secondary. I would have set it up with the SSD having op sys and all programs, with the HDD for data.

From the sound of it, you could have just bought the SSD, installed it as the primary drive in the Inspiron, and moved the HDD to secondary, installing OS and programs on the SSD

However - you won't be able to 'copy' or 'move' programs from old machine to new. They don't work like that. You have to install them from disc or from an install package that you've downloaded.

As Nifty said, do a clean install of everything. You downloaded them originally, do so again for the latest version as a clean download

I_have_spoken

Yes, definitely want to boot off the SSD and use this as the temp drive for Photoshop, and keep the 1Gb for photos, docs etc.

If it was mine, I'd 'clone' the 1GB onto the SSD, shrinking the partition size.

Upgrade to Windows 10, Windows 8.1 is horrid.

Format the 1Gb, then install the programs from downloads.

Copy over photos and documents from the Dell by attaching the disk in a USB caddy, then use it for backups.

NiftyDigits

googler wrote: »

You've done it backwards to the way I would recommend.

You've got an HDD with the operating system, and you're adding an SSD as a secondary. I would have set it up with the SSD having op sys and all programs, with the HDD for data.

From the sound of it, you could have just bought the SSD, installed it as the primary drive in the Inspiron, and moved the HDD to secondary, installing OS and programs on the SSD

However - you won't be able to 'copy' or 'move' programs from old machine to new. They don't work like that. You have to install them from disc or from an install package that you've downloaded.

As Nifty said, do a clean install of everything. You downloaded them originally, do so again for the latest version as a clean download

That is not what the OP is doing.. He wants to clone the Inspiron HDD on to the SSD and then use it as the Boot drive on the HP.

googler

NiftyDigits wrote: »

That is not what the OP is doing.. He wants to clone the Inspiron HDD on to the SSD and then use it as the Boot drive on the HP.

That's not the way I read it.

Happychappy wrote: »

I have also bought separately, a SanDisk 240gb SSD which I need to fit

The pc comes wth a 1TB Hard drive which is fine for storing photos etc, but I want the SSD to store my documents and Office

Any advice on the simplest way ... to add my SSD to the new pc would be gratefuly received. I was going to add the SSD to my old computer last year, but hung on till I bought a new PC, and now the time has come

NiftyDigits

googler wrote: »

That's not the way I read it.

The pc comes wth a 1TB Hard drive which is fine for storing photos etc, but I want the SSD to store my documents and Office,

So it's clear that he means for it to be the boot drive....with the 1TB to be used for storage.
You need to be able to compensate for the OP inability to describe using the correct terminology. If they were experienced, they wouldn't be posting here for advice.

NiftyDigits

Why anyone would imagine that the OP should or would want to use it as anything but the boot drive, escapes me...and that is putting it politely.

Happychappy

Hi Guys
Really sorry if I have caused confusion ?
I had 4gb of RAM in the Inspiron, but the main issue was it was sluggish and would slow right down to a crawl with the fan making weird and wonderful noises, this would mainly happen during the first hour of starting up, I didn't know if this was the Acronis True Image backing up, so I changed the setting to manual updates so I could see if this was the culprit, but it made no difference,hence the reason to upgrade, also from booting up to be able to use the web browser, was Opera, but more recently chrome, it would take around 5 - 6 minutes, hence, time to change

It sounds what I want to do is not going to be easy ? all I want is to install the SSD drive which is new so has no operating system on, and install Windows 10 onto this, this will then be my C drive to boot up from, I want to use this for browsing, load Office 2013 onto this, as well as keep my documents on this, including my photo's.

The the main programs I currently use, are Rosetta Stone, Dream Weaver and Adobe Photoshop, I still have the photoshop disc, so no problem reloading, the Rosetta Stone I downloaded an e-version which somehow made two ghost drives, I can't remember how on earth I did it, but it works and I'm afraid if I try and change it, something will go wrong ? these two drives show as CDFS drives? they contain all the video, photos etc for the program, I did this around 10 or 15 years ago, I don't have the original email or download information, it was through some offer like Scan computers or similar, you buy the program and log on to download, likewise Dreamweaver was possibly the original version they produced, again around 15 years ago, it works fie and does everything I need ?


Both these programs are on my current hard drive, so I wanted to clone the Inspiron hard drive, possibly using Acronis True Image, and move it to the 1TB hard drive on the new computer, so basically I boot up on the new SD drive and then access the normal Itb HD for filling etc ?

I have a Seagate 2 TB external drive which I currently have linked to my Inspiron and which Acronis backs up too. My Inspiron C hard drive which holds everything on my computer is 196 GB, so will easily fit to the 1TB HP computer.

I have already bought a SATA cable for the 240 GB SSD, now just need to know if what I want to do can be achieved ? I suppos ae as I have enough space on the SSD drive I could just transfer everything onto the SSD and boot from that and just use one of the others drives for back up, but I really didn't want a lot of clutter on the SSD.

Hope that helps ?

NiftyDigits

Happychappy wrote: »

Hi Guys
Really sorry if I have caused confusion ?
I had 4gb of RAM in the Inspiron, but the main issue was it was sluggish and would slow right down to a crawl with the fan making weird and wonderful noises, this would mainly happen during the first hour of starting up, I didn't know if this was the Acronis True Image backing up, so I changed the setting to manual updates so I could see if this was the culprit, but it made no difference,hence the reason to upgrade, also from booting up to be able to use the web browser, was Opera, but more recently chrome, it would take around 5 - 6 minutes, hence, time to change

It sounds what I want to do is not going to be easy ? all I want is to install the SSD drive which is new so has no operating system on, and install Windows 10 onto this, this will then be my C drive to boot up from, I want to use this for browsing, load Office 2013 onto this, as well as keep my documents on this, including my photo's.

The the main programs I currently use, are Rosetta Stone, Dream Weaver and Adobe Photoshop, I still have the photoshop disc, so no problem reloading, the Rosetta Stone I downloaded an e-version which somehow made two ghost drives, I can't remember how on earth I did it, but it works and I'm afraid if I try and change it, something will go wrong ? these two drives show as CDFS drives? they contain all the video, photos etc for the program, I did this around 10 or 15 years ago, I don't have the original email or download information, it was through some offer like Scan computers or similar, you buy the program and log on to download, likewise Dreamweaver was possibly the original version they produced, again around 15 years ago, it works fie and does everything I need ?


Both these programs are on my current hard drive, so I wanted to clone the Inspiron hard drive, possibly using Acronis True Image, and move it to the 1TB hard drive on the new computer, so basically I boot up on the new SD drive and then access the normal Itb HD for filling etc ?

I have a Seagate 2 TB external drive which I currently have linked to my Inspiron and which Acronis backs up too. My Inspiron C hard drive which holds everything on my computer is 196 GB, so will easily fit to the 1TB HP computer.

I have already bought a SATA cable for the 240 GB SSD, now just need to know if what I want to do can be achieved ? I suppos ae as I have enough space on the SSD drive I could just transfer everything onto the SSD and boot from that and just use one of the others drives for back up, but I really didn't want a lot of clutter on the SSD.

Hope that helps ?

Refer to post #2.

I'll assist with Rosetta Stone when you get to that point.
Your two options with which to begin is either to clone the HP HDD to the SSD, adapting the partitions as necessary or simply running a clean install with Windows 10 media to the SSD, entering the Windows 8.1 key. Then you reinstall your programs..that work with Windows 10.

You can use the Product Key Viewer to retrieve the key.