Clean Install Windows 10  

Pragnesh89 said:

Thank you for responding this late in the night. Let me give this a try. It wont hurt.

So this made minimal difference in windows boot time. Everything looks to be the same. It looks like my hard drive has reached EOL. I bought the samsung evo 860 so that should give my laptop some life. My plan is to clone the current HDD onto the new SSD and then do a clean install again. My question is, will it activate again? I think it will but just wanted to confirm.

Pragnesh89 said:

So this made minimal difference in windows boot time. Everything looks to be the same. It looks like my hard drive has reached EOL. I bought the samsung evo 860 so that should give my laptop some life. My plan is to clone the current HDD onto the new SSD and then do a clean install again. My question is, will it activate again? I think it will but just wanted to confirm.

If you are going to do a clean install again, then why in the world would you clone first? And yes, Windows will activate.

NavyLCDR said:

If you are going to do a clean install again, then why in the world would you clone first? And yes, Windows will activate.

When I bought my original laptop, it had Windows 7 Home. Then through my college, I was able to install Windows 7 professional and recently got a free upgrade to Windows 10 Professional. So I have no idea how to install windows 10 on the new SSD without cloning the existing drive.

Pragnesh89 said:

When I bought my original laptop, it had Windows 7 Home. Then through my college, I was able to install Windows 7 professional and recently got a free upgrade to Windows 10 Professional. So I have no idea how to install windows 10 on the new SSD without cloning the existing drive.

Well, you would install it to the new SSD the same way you would do the subsequent clean install after cloning. And the procedure is the first post in this thread.

NavyLCDR said:

Well, you would install it to the new SSD the same way you would do the subsequent clean install after cloning. And the procedure is the first post in this thread.

Oh, my plan was to just use the recovery option and doing a full clean install from windows after cloning the HDD.

thomaseg1 said:

That is a Reset rather than a clean install.
A clean install is entirely new Windows while Reset you can save some of your programs and data.

Thanks for the correction. I would clone the existing HDD to the SSD. And then from the SSD, use the reset options to reset with a clean install and save no existing data.

If you want a "clean install", what do you gain by doing a clone first?