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#11
Laptops are trickier, too many plastic parts for my taste. However, most manufacturers offer a service manual that will pretty much walk you through every step of common tasks. These are generally free and downloadable.
Be sure you have a good set of very small screwdrivers before you start. Also, lay everything out on a sheet or piece of cardboard; the screws are easy to lose. Keep track of which holes require longer, or shorter, screws.
Take pictures as you go so you won't forget how it came apart.
That is a no brainer - especially if you have a seperate opening for the disk bay. Then just unscrew the 2 or 4 screws, lift the cover and push the HDD backwards. Installing the SSD is the process in reverse. Before you do that, you must have imaged the OS to an external disk. That image you can now place back on the SSD. I recommend NOT to use cloning.
You said it davidhk. I think many, including myself, know that you are NOT a no-brainer, FWIW. That's pretty clear. I'll only +1 what wreckwriter said. It depends on your particular laptop as to how many brains it takes - but a lot can be overcome with a few instructions and a good measure of meticulous care.
Just go for it Wreckwriter, after building my own pCs for 15 years getting a SSD is the best upgrade I ever made.
I was running Windows 10 on 2 WD Velociraptors in RAID 0 then decided to do a clean install, I was disappointed that Win 10 wasn't running faster so decided to get a SSD. The difference was amazing, 12 second bootup and the PC was so much more responsive.
So now I've ended up with a 480GB Sandisk Ultra SSD, 2 x WD Caviars in RAID 0 for games and a 3TB WD red for backups and storage.
Still trying to figure out what to do with my Velociraptors :)
Yup go for it, it's a no brainer.
You guys have me pretty much convinced. What size you think I need if I put most data on a regular drive?
My Sandisk is 480GB and I probably only have 40 GB taken up with Win 10, MS office and a fair amount of regular apps.
So I'd get a 250GB so you would have plenty of room for adding other stuff. In fact I wish I'd gone for a smaller one now.