Oh yeah, sorry about that. It's a desktop with space for a few more hard drives. So I'm fine with just plugging the thing in and then moving the OS? Do I need to wipe the older drive before booting or would it be enough just to change the boot order in BIOS?

Normally you would anyway want to reformat completely the "old" drive.

I would still use the external connection though, meaning I would remove the old drive, put it in an external usb box, test the system with the SSD, then connect the usb box and reformat the old drive. But I am playing it very safe. Normally, once the migration software tells you the cloning process went well, you can wipe out the old drive.

Otherwise, change the boot order, or better remove the old disk from the bootable device list, then if everything is well after a reboot, wipe it .

As @nepundo has said, you can get an ISO off M$ website and burn to disc, so long as you have a valid license key that's no problem. As for installing from my experience installing windows is pretty simple, and so long as you have the right drivers should be a quick run through. Cloning on the other hand didn't work for me and I spent days trying to get it to work, brought docking station for HDD and everything, ended up dropping the idea, buying a new copy on Win7 and re-installing. Probably cost me £150 in the end for the docking station and Win7, not to mention time wasted on it. now I have Win7 on one SSD, Win10 on another, and Linux on a third, with a hotswap drive in the machine, plug in the drive I want and switch on.

This. No way in hell would I format the old drive until I make sure that everything is working perfectly with the new one. Actually my first choice would be removing it after cloning it and switching the computer off, and before the first reboot.

Same applies if for some reason you end up reinstalling Windows. Keep the old one in case something goes wrong and you have to plug the old one back. Also, you have to reinstall the programs you use, but the old disk can be your data backup (documents, installers, the Galaxy folder if you use it, etc).

By the way, just a couple of days ago I reinstalled Windows 7 and Galaxy. I told Galaxy to rescan my old games folder, that I had in another hard disk, and it worked flawlessly. No need to redownload or reinstall any game. Even Steam gave me more trouble with that, although in the end I only had to redownload a couple of games. All in all I was quite surprised. I had readied myself for the worst, but no, I didn't end up downloading again 400 GB or so of games... :-D

Just telling you in case that "reinstalling everything" means mostly games.

If the new drive is as least as big as the old one, cloning is the easiest and simplest way to go. A simple linux command of dd will do the job.

[code]
dd if=/dev/hdxx of=/dev/hdxx bs=1M
[/code]

However since it's likely Windows that's a little different. I don't have much experience of transferring an OS, often it needs to be installed from scratch.
If you have a lot of games for sure.

I have my usual set of programs. FireFox (or similar) plus plugins, CCCP, 7zip, HashTabs, MingW, Bink/Rad Video Tools, Virtual Dub, VLC, imDisk, VirtualBox, PSPX, utorrent, pidgin, Sumatra PDF, Notepad++, and anything else I think I need ad the time. All of what I listed may not be 400Gigs, but I try not to have so much installed at once for games, although I do have the installers on hand, in case I wanted to play them.


Ahhh.. Games, video and music. the 95% of space used on disks...

On modern Linux systems, drive names now start with s rather than h, so it's actually something like
dd if=/dev/sdx of=/dev/sdy bs=1M

(Replace x and y with the appropriate letters, but *make sure* you get it right, or else you will be cloning the blank drive onto your main drive, which will destroy your data! The "lsblk" command might be useful here.)

Also, a Live CD will be sufficient for this task.

Note that you will likely need to prepend sudo to the dd command for it to work; I recommend not typing the word "sudo" until you have triple-checked the rest of the command, making *absolutely sure* that you didn't mix up the i and the o.

I'd do a clean install anyway, I occasionally like to restart from a clean table. I'm odd that way.

I quite often do that even with Linux, when e.g. a new version of Mint is released.

Hmh, maybe the safest bet is to do a full, clean re-install.