Ok, we have a desktop in our bedroom that has a traditional hard drive. It's getting pretty noisy, and my HCBW would like "a quieter" option. So I'm thinking about replacing it with a SSD. I'm also wondering about replacing the HDD with a SSD in one of our laptops, to get more drive space mostly.

My question is .... how do you transfer Win OS, the recovery partitions, and stuff like that?

It seems to me, the following process.... but I want to talk to the Techies first....

1) Attached the new drive to the computer using USB or something like that
2) Run the recovery program on the original hard drive, and have it install everything on the new hard drive.
3) Swap the original drive out for the new SSD drive
4) Run updates and such on the computer to get it updated.
5) attached the old drive to the computer using USB or something like that
5) Run restore backup to get back the documents and such on the old drive

IS that about right? Can the "recovery" drive stuff be run to copy all that onto the new SSD drive? Is there a better option?

Are there options to just duplicate the drive? Would that duplicate the startup information and the recovery partition? I'm not sure I really want that, since one (secondary) advantage I was hoping to get is to have a completely clean install of Windows on the new drive. BUT, if that is the best way, I'm good with that too.

As I understand it, the windows license number is somehow buried on the hard drive, so how do I transfer that? Will it just come in both of those options? Do I need to do something else to get Windows to consider it "genuine"?

What are my options?