Hey all,
I'm about to upgrade my system! Woohoo! I recently made the plunge and bought a i5 3570K to replace my aging E8400 C2D, with the respective MOBO and RAM. However, before I get started with the upgrade project, I had a few questions regarding re-installing Windows. First off, I have a SSD boot drive, and a higher capacity HDD that I keep all my "crap" on. It seems like I just got my system settings the way I want them (including downloading things, having iTunes save music, etc. all on my HDD by default). Is there any way to essentially clone my computer(or all these settings, at least) onto the new hardware? Or, am I better off just doing a clean install of windows? Typically I've been doing clean installs when I upgrade, but they're really time consuming. I don't know if I'm just incompetent or what, but it typically takes me the better part of a day to: Get Windows installed/updated, remember all the programs I had on my computer, install them, and get the settings back to the way I had them before. I was just kind of curious if there was a way to expedite this process.
This brings me to my second question. Is secure erasing my SSD truly necessary? I have no real aversion to doing it (aside from the fact that it would be my first time trying it). However, I'm not sure if/why this step is needed because of the TRIM/garbage collection function built into Windows (and in theory, my SDD) - wouldn't that take care of clearing out all the flash cells that previously had stuff written to them?
Mighty gerbils, thank you for all your help.
P.S. My apologies if this thread is in the wrong place - I tried to find the one that seemed like it fit the best.
P.S.S. Also, what should I do about the programs I have installed on the HDD, should I uninstall them before I re-install Windows? I'd rather not reformat the HDD, if I can avoid it.