Outlet machine, no respawn, best option to ssd?

I purchased an outlet M11x r3 at the back end of last year, been using it ever since (to much enjoyment) and recently picked up an ssd to give it a bit of a boost, read a bit on the forums here which recommended creating a recovery drive using respawn and an ssd. Sounds perfect to me!

HOWEVER! Having had a look I can't see respawn on here at all, nothing in the start menu and can't see anything after a poke around.

So I was really wondering what my options are? The ssd came with a copy of Norton Ghost, can that create a recovery disk? (just reading on it now in case). Or am I better just to clone the existing drive onto the ssd?

Any pointers gratefully received!

 

I would never recommend a clone, ever. If you have paid money for a new drive and (i would assume) want the performance of a new drive, why would the first thing you do be copying a slugish old operating system onto it?

You don't need Respawn, just put the SSD in and do a fresh format, then go to the Dell site and get the drivers. Simple.

 

Even if you had respawn the version that came with the R3 required the drive to be the same size or larger (actually I am just assuming the larger as mine came with a 750GB).

I just installed a 256GB SSD and did a clean install. Look into making a Win 7 USB install thumb drive. Makes the install pretty quick. Just make sure you have your network drivers downloaded ahead of time as a minimum. Check the forum here for how to restore the Alieneware look as well.

 

Yeah, clean installs are the best, dell has all of the drivers you need and they make it easy to install. Enjoy your SSD, you will never want to go back

 

Not true, on my R3 (came stock with 320GB WD Black) i used Alienrespawn out of the box to create a restore media drive which i then used on my 128GB Crucial M4 which has been in my R3 ever since.

 

If you need to do a clean install, here is how you do it. I would recommend as Rishwin says, a clean install instead of the cloning, some settings are changed when you migrate from an HDD to an SSD within Windows.

 

That's cool. I know my respawn stick always says you need a 750GB drive if I try and use it on a smaller one. I know older some versions of the software (the version that came with my m17x r2 for one) didn't seem as picky.

As a re-install from scratch from a USB stick to an SSD is pretty quick it hasn't been an issue for me. Specially since either way your probably going to be running a crazy number of Windows Updates LOL.

 

Thanks for the tips, I did a clean install of Windows 7 on it last night using that guide and the sean one I've seen linked elsewhere. Seems ok now, althought for some reason the sound has stopped working! Oh well.

 

No problem!. But the Audio thing is weird, did you check if the audio was missing in the device manager?

 

I figure something funny happened during the windows updates after finishing the install (it worked immediately after I finished the install).

I reinstalled the driver and it seems to be working ok now so all good!

What's the best application to test the speed of the drive?

 

Crystal Disk Mark is a good option, it does random read/write tests on a selected drive and it's easy to read MP/s results for each test. Plus, it's free.