With a laptop there are only so many things you can upgrade on it by yourself, RAM is one and the other one is swapping out the normal hard drive and installing an SSD (solid state drive) this will allow your laptop to boot faster, load things quicker and can make your sluggish laptop just that much better.

In this post, I will talk about my experience about cloning my hard drive onto an SSD drive and let you know which program worked perfectly after trying a whole bunch of other ones that just didn’t boot after I installed the new SSD drive into the laptop.

The process of swapping hard drives (my experience)

• Buy new hard drive
  

Buying one that is the same size or bigger than your current hard drive makes sense, seeing as most laptops only have room for one hard drive you will need to clone everything across.

For me, I bought a 240gb hard drive, and the existing hard drive was a 250gb drive but only 170gb was being used on that drive.

• Find a way of connecting your new hard drive to your laptop
  

You can achieve this by using SATA to USB cables, a docking station of some sort or the way I did it was to buy a hard drive enclosure.

• You’ll need to get some software to do the cloning
  

There are many different products out there, and I tried a bunch of them. Some seemed to work only to not work on the bootup after I swapped the drives, others couldn’t deal with the fact the drives were different sizes even though the original wasn’t full, and some took ages to do the clone only to then fail.

So I finally came across AOMEI Backupper Standard

This isn’t some kind of affiliate thing or anything like that, this is the product that I came across that worked perfectly for me, without the need for paying for anything or any of te extra features.

AOMEI Backupper Standard worked really well, I had to change the partition sizing on my hard drive so that it appeared smaller so it could be cloned to the new SSD drive, once the clone was done I removed the old drive from the laptop, took the SSD out of the external enclosure, put that in the laptop and haven’t looked back. It worked perfectly first time. The only thing I did once I had it up and running was to change the size of the drive again so I could use all of it.

Conclusion

Once you have the right tools, this job is really easy and well worth it. My laptop while old compared to the latest ones, now boots up really quickly and programs seem to load faster, making the whole experience that much better and breathing life into old hardware.