razornet | SSD install with windows 7. Old stuff onto new.

Originally published at reflections. You can comment here or there.

My good friend robinbloke recommended this guide for installing a new SSD and windows. It's very thorough and simple to follow, almost everything is explained in terms of why as well as how. I didn't follow it down to the last detail because a lot of it looks like unecessary tuning to reap beneifts that aren't experiencable. End result: One W7 installation on a 128GB OCZ Vertex Plus R2 £65.99 from PC world (same as ebuyer strangely) with a few tweaks to avoid unecessary writes and a boot-to-desktop time of about 10-12 seconds.

Some points of reference that aren't covered in that guide if you're trying to recover your old W7 setup though.

Backing up at the very least your *entire* user profile ( /Users/[your username]/ ) is really only sensisble, it'll save you time later getting your themes and settings back the way they used to be. W7 is surprisingly understanding in this regard.
Permenantly moving your personal directory locations (downloads, documents, music, etc) to a non-ssd HDD is covered. What's perhaps not mentioned is that Important Stuff like your AppData roaming profiles will stay on the SSD drive. This isn't an issue and probably doesn't need to be changed, but when copying your old user profile across from an old integrated system drive you'll want to stick AppData and any other top level configs stuff on the SSD not the HDD examples would be AppData/ and any .{directory}/ hidden folders.
If you have less than 8GB of memory it's still advisable to have a page file and it can't hurt to have that page file on a separate non-SSD HDD, the difference in life span of the SSD as a result may be marginal but so is the performance boost.
You may find that you others drives that were previously attached to the old OS are not accessible. This guide shows you how to retake ownership of them.

Having gone through that lot I've now got everthing pretty much back the way it was but smoother and faster with the added bonus that I did a lot of housekeeping along the way. All apps with the exception of the Steam and Origin UI's are on separate drives. A WD 150GB raptor for steam games and Origin and a 500GB Barracuda for everything else.