Installing the drive into the Dell snap-in case required flipping the drive around, then switching screw positions to get the drive up to the necessary depth to plug the SATA and power cables.
Rather than wipe the OEM 80GB 7200rpm hard drive, I swapped it out so that if need be (considering the failure rates of SSDs) I'd always have a backup, albeit a WindowsXP backup. Actually, I had some data on it that I should have migrated, but I chose to leap ahead with the SSD.
I pulled out the Windows Upgrade DVD that, if you can believe, I pre-purchased it the month before Windows 7 was released. Don't ask why I waited so long, other than the knowledge that I had meant to do this a long time ago.
Anyway, the clean install was going fine, until it came to activation -- it didn't work. I pulled up Dell chat to see if there was anything they could help with, but they were not very helpful at all, except to say that the product key on my case was just for XP -- duh!
Next step was to talk to Microsoft customer service. It turns out, they are very solid in customer service. Love them for that.
Somewhere in between getting Microsoft's help, I had to figure out what I did with my passphrase for my WiFi -- something that I did not apparently write down anywhere, but somehow after 10 minutes I figured it out.
After getting online and reconnecting with Microsoft customer service, I was transferred to a technical service guy, who used LogMeIn to go into my computer and edit the registry -- something I had read about online as one of the options to get Windows7 to install on a clean drive.
Yay! I am now finally on the computer and slowly installing programs.
The biggest benefit, is that now my computer recognizes all 8 GB of RAM, which it would not when it was running 32 bit XP.
Double-yay!
Eventually I'll grab the old data and drop it into the new drive. Start up is very fast by comparison. Can't wait to add an SSD to my laptop.
Update: I should mention, everything worked without having to download drivers for. The biggest problem is remembering where I left the info for my registered software, discs, and the software that I need to download and install to make things mostly whole again. The *partial* software list:
- SketchUp Pro
- Adobe CS 5.5
- 7Zip
- Kerkythea 2008 / 2.5.2
- CDBurnerXP
- Winamp
- VLC player
- Chrome
- Firefox
- Opera
- IE9 (Win7 shipped with IE8)
- Dropbox
- Picasa
- Google Earth
- Handbrake
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