Upgrade ThinkPad to SSD?

I'm seriously considering this. How would I go about doing the upgrade? Could I use thinkvantage rescue and recovery to create a backup on an external HDD and recover on the new SSD after the switch?

If I decide to go with XP, how would that go about? I don't have a cd rom but I could borrow my brother's. What about drivers and so on, I never really fresh installed an OS before.

One last thing. I'm doing this because Vista is slow and my battery life is abysmal! Does an SSD drain a lot of the battery? Or would XP even that out?

 

You could simply download the trial version of Acronis True image and make a copy of your hard drive. replace the HD with an SSD and then reimage your ssd.

The software has a 15 day timestamp on creating backups but no timestamp on the backup made so its good forever.

 

Thanks Flamenko. That does sound tempting, does it mirror the who hard disk or just the part with the OS? With thinkpads, would I still benefit from the recovery partition and thinkvantage button? Acutually, with only 32GB I don't I want to do so.

How about freshly installing XP? And what about compatibility and size, would the one I linked fit?

 

I cant answer anything specific to the Thinkpad, only with regards to the SSD. it works exactly the same as the HD with no additional software required.

When you do a disk image, it places the image exactly onto the new disk which includes the orig disk size.

For eg. if you backed up a 32Gb SSD and placed it on a 64Gb ssd, you would have 32gb unallocated for you to format and use as another drive.

 

MYK, for the reasons you mentioned, why not first try a clean install of Vista? Your computer is more than capable of running it very well. If anything, Vista gives me more battery life than XP due to even more power management options. Are you disabling Aero on battery? Do you turn the screen brightness down? Do you set your processor power down to 50%?

While I will not take away from SSD that it is faster, produces less heat, and will save a little bit of battery life (isn't it about 20 minutes?) compared to a regular HD, it is also expensive and you will be going from 160gb to 32gb of storage space.

 

were you ever successful doing this ?