Replacing your laptop's hard drive with an SSD is one of the best methods to significantly increase its speed and performance if it seems to be getting slower and more unresponsive. PLUS, it will also help to increase its battery life and keep it slightly cooler on your lap, too.
Drive in blank and install Windows - or whatever operating system you’ll be using - from scratch or to clone the contents of the old hard drive onto the new one.
Install OP Windows on a blank SSD or clone the HDD to an SSD
I’ll be showing you what you can do to put your laptop’s old hard drive to good use, too.
Next, If you want a fresh, clean Windows installation though, BEFORE you proceed, you’ll need to make a bootable USB installation drive for Windows. You can move on to the next step if you do not need to perform this.
Making A USB Installation Media to Install Windows Newly
You need a USB flash drive with a minimum capacity of 8GB is required. I’ve put a link in the video description which takes you to the Microsoft website where you can select the version of Windows, Windows 10 in this case, then under Create Windows 10 installation media you can click Download Tool Now.
Run the tool and when it asks what you want to do, choose Create Installation media. If you’re running this on the same laptop you’ll be installing Windows on later, leave ticked the box that says “Use the recommended options for this PC.” Plug in your USB flash drive and then select it from the drive list - be careful to select the right one as everything on it’ll get wiped. The tool will then download the most up-to-date Windows setup files and set them up on the USB flash drive ready for use later once you’ve installed your new SSD. It’ll take a little while and you can still use your computer for other things while it completes.
The next step now is to remove your current hard drive. Some laptops have special flaps to let you easily access RAM and hard drives, but sadly newer ones tend not to so you have to take the whole bottom off. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it does make it slightly more complicated and potentially daunting to open up the whole machine. But don’t worry, these steps will guide you through and you’ll see how easy it can be.
So, to completely remove this laptop’s outer garments, flip the laptop over and if it has a removable battery, remove it. The exact procedure from here on in varies from laptop to laptop so yours might be quite different from this, but the general concepts are all the same.
Remove all the screws, and place them to one side being careful not to let any roll away and get lost. Be sure to pay attention to where each screw came from if, on your laptop, some are different lengths.
Dismantling Your Laptop to Reveal Hard Drive
iFixit is a great website for disassembly guides of almost various devices - just search for your model of laptop. They also do some great quality toolkits for repairing gadgets.
With all the screws removed, use a plastic pick to gently pry apart the laptop at the edges. Take your time and gently run along to unclip the plastic clips underneath, being careful not to snap them!
Once it’s loose, take off the lid to reveal the inner workings of the laptop. This is the hard drive here. SATA hard drives have two connections running to them, for power and data, but it’s quite common - like on this laptop here - for a separate little circuit board (sometimes called a daughterboard) to connect to them both and then use one combined connection back to the computer’s main motherboard. So in this case, it’s just this flap here we need to lever up carefully to disconnect the hard drive. Then you can remove all the screws and carefully lift away the hard drive, slide the daughterboard off and remove the mounting hardware from the drive.
Attach the SSD to the laptop’s mounting hardware being careful to attach it all the same way round as the hard drive sat, and then screw it in place and connect any ribbon cables. Then, just reverse all the steps to put the laptop back together ready for switch-on.
Install New SSD into Laptop
If you cloned your hard drive contents to the SSD then you should be finished now, although if the SSD is larger than the hard drive was then you might have a partition which is only as large as your hard drive was, in which case some free space might be left unused and unavailable - go into Disk Management to remedy that.
If you’re going down the fresh install road then grab the USB flash drive you made earlier on and boot up from that. To do that, depending on your laptop and how old it is, you may need to go into BIOS / or UEFI to disable secure boot and then go to legacy and get it to boot off USB first. Don’t forget to either change this back or restore defaults after you’ve installed Windows!
Your computer will now boot from the USB drive and you can install a fresh copy of Windows and once that’s done you can then use a hard drive docking station to copy all the data off your old hard drive and back onto your laptop and its new SSD, and then once you’ve done that - don’t throw away that old hard drive, buy a cheap portable USB caddy like this one to turn it into a handy portable external hard drive that you can use for things like backups and carrying large files and documents around with you.
