Best way to install?

Hello

just taken delivery of my shiny Thinkpad E320 , never going to touch cheap £300 plastic toys again now ive had a taste of something a bit nicer! but anyway

i specced one up with 2gb ram and a 5400rpm 320gb drive to replace these parts myself as the price difference was insane

have a Samsung 830 SSD sat on my desk and am awaiting my 8gb of ram at which point ill swap them over and reinstall windows

Anyway, just looking for a bit of advice..as the E320 lacks an optical ive currently backed up the recovery partition onto a USB stick and was going to store it somewhere safe as im probably going to sell the HDD (..or maybe stick it in my PS3)

Would installing the SSD and running the recovery option from the bootable USB stick, format the drive, sort the alignment out and put a factory restored copy of windows onto it and be all good? Or am i better off doing a clean fresh install of windows myself and then heading over to Lenovo website to download all the drivers W7 might have missed?

Im purely thinking about this from a driver point of view, i have no issue doing either way and to be honest there doesnt appear to be that much bloatware on the laptop as it is it, a few Lenovo apps and a filthy copy of Norton which ill remove myself

Would it make any difference what i do? apart from the obvious bloatware id need to remove if i used the factory image

Thanks

 

Clean install with downloaded latest drivers highly recommended. Alignment will be guaranteed to be correct, not to mention the benefits of the latest drivers on a clean (bare...) Win7x64 install.

Good luck.

 

Fair enough, i was hoping the recovery would save a few driver searches but if clean is recommended then why not

Cheers

 

I had exact same dilemma with my latitude 6520.
I went ahead with clean win7 64 bit copy and installed in sequence found here on dell forums.
I cant be more happy than this.
its superb .
clean install follow the way.....