Advice needed on switching from HDD to SSD

[Zuthrain]

Finally after all these years my 1Tb HDD with my OS and other goodies has started making an audible clicking noise and has became tediously slow in windows, what my question is: if i purchase a 240gb SSD, will I be able to somehow port my windows to the SSD and my other files to my current secondary HDD? i’ve never swapped an OS from one drive to another, pls help

[Enderman]

You should do a clean install.

[Zuthrain]

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

You should do a clean install.

is there any way i can preserve sections of my HDD, for example i do a clean install but can somehow drop in all my userdata and games? my internet here is painfully slow and redownloading everything would make me lose part of my soul

[Enderman]

Just now, Zuthrain said:

is there any way i can preserve sections of my HDD, for example i do a clean install but can somehow drop in all my userdata and games? my internet here is painfully slow and redownloading everything would make me lose part of my soul

Programs need to be redownloaded and reinstalled but after installing windows you can plug your HDD back in and access your files through file explorer to move documents and games and pictures to the SSD.

[mariushm]

It would be best to simply install the SSD and reinstall Windows.

 

If you have less than 240 GB used on your hard drive, you could probably easily clone the mechanical drive using various programs.

See https://www.techradar.com/best/best-disk-cloning-software

Try Macrium Reflect or AOMEI Backupper and see how that works for you.

 

For some applications, you can copy over the files they hide in Users\[your name]\Application Data  ... the Users folder is typically hidden, but you can go in Windows Explorer and check show hidden or system files.

Firefox and Chrome keep the user profiles there as well. So you can install Firefox or Chrome on new Windows installation and then simply copy profile over

[Zuthrain]

6 minutes ago, mariushm said:

It would be best to simply install the SSD and reinstall Windows.

 

If you have less than 240 GB used on your hard drive, you could probably easily clone the mechanical drive using various programs.

See https://www.techradar.com/best/best-disk-cloning-software

Try Macrium Reflect or AOMEI Backupper and see how that works for you.

 

For some applications, you can copy over the files they hide in Users\[your name]\Application Data  ... the Users folder is typically hidden, but you can go in Windows Explorer and check show hidden or system files.

Firefox and Chrome keep the user profiles there as well. So you can install Firefox or Chrome on new Windows installation and then simply copy profile over

i have nearly 900ish gigs, think there’s a way to get my user files and such and copy them onto a fresh install?