SSD questions

Hi all. I'm about to upgrade to an SSD and I have a couple of questions. I currently have W7 on its own partition, and aside from a couple of Steam games, nothing else is on it. Would I be better off to migrate the OS or just do a fresh install? Also, I have the swap file on its own partition. Can I leave it where it is or should I go ahead and put it on the SSD? About firmware updates- I've seen a couple of ways to update. What method would you recommend? Anything else I should be aware of? Thanks.

I personally would do a fresh install. This insures all the drive letters and mapping is set up correctly in the Registry.

It does no good, in terms of performance, to put the page file on a separate "partition". Separate drive, yes. But not partition. And SSDs are ideal for Page Files.

As for firmware updates, I recommend using the procedure suggested by your SSD maker.

I should have clarified...the swap file is on its own 10 gig partition on another drive, and the OS is on its own 80 gig partition on the first drive. I read that Paragon is a really good option for cloning a HDD and will automatically align the SSD for you. Seems a lot easier than installing everything again from scratch.

It can be, if all goes well. But there's no promise of that so a complete backup is necessary anyway.

Yeah, I was planning on that anyway. Luckily, I have W7 all by itself, so there is no data to worry about other than what is in program files, i.e. Browser, email, etc. about 70 gigs' worth or so. Plus, it's a fairly fresh install of W7--about 3 months ago I did a fresh install and I have had no problems with it.

Well, since this is a fairly fresh install anyway, if this were me, I would reinstall it - it is not like you have years of updates and data on it.

All you concern is how to full play the performance of SSD, Even you do a fresh install you'll first need to turn on AHCI in BIOS and then you could do a fresh install. but that will take a much of time. Here I suggest you change the register key value " HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Msahci" to "0" and then turn on AHCI in BIOS, then you could directly use free software Aomei Partition Assistant Home edition, it provides migrate OS wizard very easy to handle and it could guarantee the partition be aligned after the process.