I work at a computer store as a Technician and we do it all the time. The customer upgrades his/her laptop with an SSD and we clone the old disk to the SSD to avoid reinstalling everything from scratch. Make sure the data fit on the SSD, otherwise move some data to another disk before cloning. If the disk is marked "unchecked for errors", most cloning applications might try to clone bit-by-bit to rescue a "faulty" disk and tell you is not possible because SSD is smaller than HDD. Make sure you run chkdsk (check for errors and fix them) before cloning to avoid this problem. Then you install the SSD inside the laptop and you connect the HDD in a SATA to USB case or adapter. You either clone within Windows (Macrium Reflect) or boot from the clone utility (Acronis and others) and do the clone. Once the clone has been completed successfully, you should be able to boot into Windows without changing anything in BIOS.