Moving Win7 to a new SSD?

[Islander]

Am I asking for trouble? The setup: Win7 SP1 64-bit Home Premium installed on the PC's single 1TB HDD; add a new 128GB SSD to become the boot drive. How do I move Windows?

The deeper setup: this PC doesn't exist yet. I'm in the middle of accumulating components for what will be my first DIY PC and naturally my shopping list is hard up against my budget constraints - $1,100. minus dispay and other peripherals. Will be a dedicated gamer, to play racing games at >40fps on a single 24"-27" display at high or near high settings (pCARS, Assetto Corsa). I had originally planned on a 128GB SSD and a 1TB HDD, but in order to advance the project a bit have about decided to forego the SSD for now and put the thing together with just the HDD. Add the SSD later. Upon further thought, not sure that's such a good idea. Probably I should just suck it up and wait til the pennies add up to enough to include the SSD. Or forget the SSD altogether.

I'm dithering, I know, but it would help me move on if I had some idea of how complicated and/or risky it would be to add an SSD later and move Windows to it through cloning or whatever.

I will keep the old Vista budget PC for non-gaming duties and archives.

The DIY project:

Win7 SP1 64-bit Home Premium (OEM, disc) (bought)
i5-4670K, 3.4GHz (stock) (on the way)
Mobo, Asus Z87-A (on the way)
Corsair Vengeance LP, 8GB (2x4GB DDR3) (planned)
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660, 2GB (planned)
1TB WD Blue, 7200, SATA 6Gb/s, 64MB cache (bought)
PSU, Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 720W 80 PLUS Bronze (planned)
DVD burner
Case, Corsair Carbide 200R mid tower (bought)

SSD - ??
Stock cooling for a bit, before I start overclocking.

Thanks, gentlemen.

Frank

 

[Jad Chaar]

I am not sure exactly how to move info from an HDD to an SSD, but I recommend you just install Windows fresh on the SSD. It is definitely your choice though, hopefully someone else can help you out. Maybe jobeard can help.

Just a side note though, I do not recommend CM PSUs .

 

[cliffordcooley]

This little article is fairly straight forward. Although I'm with JC713 on fresh installing windows.

How to clone HDD to SSD with Windows 7′s own software

 

[Islander]

This little article is fairly straight forward. Although I'm with JC713 on fresh installing windows.

How to clone HDD to SSD with Windows 7′s own software

Thanks for your responses. I think my original hunch was correct: this is beyond my pay grade and I should just play it straight. Either do without the SSD or wait until I have it installed to install Windows. That cloning article is interesting, and it's going into my study materials. And I'll be researching PSU's further.

Although I've been a PC user since the '80's, I've never done much more than upgrade PSU's, RAM and CPU. The only time I've installed Windows myself was on an old Pentium laptop that a friend gave me. She had really scrambled things trying to just delete her files one at a time. I reformatted the laptop and installed Win98 from a new disc. No problems, but this is a bit different, and I see lots of opportunities here for me to screw things up. The smart thing for me to do is wait for the SSD, and install it first. No monkeying around. I think you guys have saved me from wandering into a minefield.

Thanks again.

Frank