Windows 10: Upgrading laptop to SSD after Windows 10 installation

Hello all,


I have a Dell laptop, XPS L501X, and have just upgraded it to Windows 10 (v 1903). The computer is 64bit, 8GB installed RAM, Intel i5 CPU and bought in 2011/12.


All seems to be going surprisingly well and I feel the upgrade has given the computer a new lease of life. I am therefore thinking I should upgrade to SSD internal drive - the computer is really great for my needs even though it seems a bit old otherwise).

I plan to have the SSD professionally fitted but want to buy the SSD myself from amazon or such like. Not being very knowledgeable about these things, I'm just a bit confused by the types and sizes but want ITB minimum if possible, ideally Samsung Evo as it seems to be highly regarded.

Can anyone suggest exactly what I should get, specs wise or SSD, so that it fits my computer and is most compatible to optimise performance?

Many thanks in advance for any advice.

Kam

:)

 

Windows 10 upgrade rant..

The free space shouldn't prevent you from upgrading to built 1607. I manually upgraded my own laptop which had only 9gigs free space left on the system drive.

I unzipped the Windows 10 Pro anniversary edition ISO on my D drive, and started the upgrade process from there. At one point the installer complained about not having enough free space on the main drive, i just had to point it to the D drive to proceed to the next step. Now the rollback installation is stored there and doesn't clog up the C drive anymore.

In your case you could insert a large sdcard to act as the required rollback drive, i'm pretty sure it would do the trick.

Oh and by the way, if you want to further compress your System files:

• do a search Command Prompt, right-click it, and select Run as administrator.
• Type COMPACT.EXE /CompactOS:always and hit Enter.

You'll will gain anything from 2 to 4 gigs free space after it's done.

 

Win 10 clean install question

This is what I would do:

• Shrink the hard drive partition until it's small enough to fit on the SSD.
• Clone the Windows 8.1 setup to the SSD.
• Boot off the SSD and make sure that Windows 8.1 is happy (i.e., no complaints about activation).
• Upgrade to Windows 10 on the SSD.

This way, you know that Windows 8.1 has a valid setup on the SSD before doing anything else. Plus, the Windows 10 upgrade will be processed much faster on the SSD. Finally, you still have the hard drive setup to fall back to if anything goes wrong.

 

Installing Windows 10 on New PC?

I'm going to be building a new PC on Christmas and want to install Windows 10 on it. I have Windows 10 on my current PC, which I installed upgrading from 8.1 with the files on a USB. How do I go about installing a clean copy of Windows 10 on this new PC? I think I recall something about installing it once makes Microsoft recognize your hardware, but since this will be a PC I'm not sure what steps I need to take. Do I need to go 8.1 -> 10 or is there a method of going directly to 10?