… piece of cake for Image For Windows.
Yesterday I helped a friend help a friend change her 2010-vintage HP mini-tower 1TB HDD to a 500GB SSD. It has a dual core Pentium, 4GB DDR3 DRAM and an MBR system. It originally ran Windows 7 Home Premium but was now running Windows 10 Version 1909. It was also loaded down with “Start with Windows” junk, BHO’s, “performance boosters/enhancers”, etc. that she had picked up over the years from her internet browsing.
She had asked my friend if she should get a new PC, and he advised that for her use (browsing and email), she would be better off and money saved if she just upgraded to a SSD, and he would put it in for her. So she ordered one from Amazon. She told my friend that she would like him to get rid of all that trash, too, if he could, and just save her pictures.
Cloning wasn’t even a consideration going from 1TB to 500GB, but Image For Windows works a treat. My friend brought the mini-tower over and extracted the HDD. I put it in the drive dock of my NAS and created a full drive image. I unplugged it and plugged in the Samsung 860 EVO SSD. I restored the image, putting a tick beside “Align to target” and “Scale to Target”. Scale to target “only applies to full drive restores. If you use this option when restoring an image, Image for Windows restores the image proportionally to the target drive.” And it did. She had only 197GB of OS and data used on her HDD in four partitions, so there was plenty of room on a 500GB SSD.
The restore proportioned the down-sized partitions correctly, my friend put the SSD in the mini-tower and booted up. Whereas it had booted in a tad over 3 minutes before, it booted from the SSD waaaaaaay faster, even with all the junk that was loading on startup.
To do a thorough cleaning, I used “Reset this PC”, choosing to keep personal files. I already had a full drive image, so nothing would be lost even if something went awry.
After the Reset (uneventful, just time consuming), it booted in under 30 seconds. All of her pictures and other user files were intact. We deemed it a success, and my friend returned the PC to his friend, who is his neighbor across the street. She’s starting the new year with a like-new PC.
