Upgrading old Laptop to SSD

[Slappy00]

So I have an old faithful ASUS U30Jc (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3730/asus-u30jc-refining-thin-and-light-performance) work laptop circa 2010 that has been chugging along just fine but I want to upgrade the drive to something faster.

The current drive has a 5400rpm drive with two partitions (OS (like 75 GB) and DATA (the rest)) I want to just copy the OS partition to a new 240GB Drive (I don't really use the DATA portion anyway) but last time I tried this it appeared that I needed the same total size SSD to match my HDD, my current replacement drive size is an intel 530 series 240GB drive.

I do have a desktop and a external USB drive available as intermediaries, so what would be a relatively painless way of going about the process?

 

[Smoove910]

use Acronis True Image (trial version is free and will work)

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/pc-backup/

As for the drive needing to be the same size, that is not a true statement. At least for me it's not. I haven't had any trouble cloning to a drive of a different size.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Pull the drive, use acronis to clone the OS partition and boot track / sector using a desktop PC, then install the SSD back into the laptop.

 

[Firetrak]

If you get a samsung SSD if comes with a data migration tool for free that works extremely well. you just need a $20 dollar dock like this one to plug in the SSD drive. Once its done you swap the drives and you just boot the laptop normally.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-221-_-Product

And it'll perfectly clone the entire drive to the new SSD, its extremely fast as well.

Basically what I did when i changed my old o/s drive to a new samsung SSD

 

[Slappy00]

Thanks for the help!