I have a family member who complains that her laptop is slow. I checked the laptop over and indeed, it was slow, so I looked into what was using the most hardware, and found that the hard drive was at 100% pretty much the whole time.
I disabled as many services and programs at startup as I could (without disabling the Trend Micro Internet Security suite), but the HDD was still at 100%. So I advised her to purchase an SSD (a Samsung 128GB, just released).
She received the drive in the post today, and she wants me to 'do my magic'.
The storage space taken up is 79GB, which is fine as she doesn't use the SSD for massive files/folders (only to browse the 'net, read emails, type up Word docs, etc). The source drive has a 260GB capacity, with an extra 60GB for the laptop's recovery partition (I don't plan to transfer this partition across).
The backup/restore utility is the standard Windows 7 backup/restore utility, though I may consider using Acronis..
I have two questions that I would like to know before I commence:
Can a system image from a larger drive be restored to a smaller one, especially since the source drive is a HDD and the target is an SSD?
Is a HDD to SSD transfer possible?
Would it just be wiser to install Windows onto the SSD, and then transfer the programs, documents, and settings of the old HDD?
I've seen this question about restoring a Windows system image to a smaller drive, but it doesn't really answer my questions.