user upgrade mSata SSD question for y580 noob

Hey all my fiance has a y580 and its great, except for the slow boot up time with the 7,000rpm drive. We decided to wait and get a better ssd than the offered 32mb cache one.....

I know that crucial has the m4 256gb one. It seems this would be pretty fantastic for all her applications, etc.

My question is this:

-If we buy our own ssd to install, is there any way to get get our windows from the factory hdd onto the new ssd, making it the boot OS? Or do we need to completely buy windows again and start from scratch? (essentially adding another 80 bucks to this process). Is lenovo like Dell where you can call them up and ask for a "dell specific" windows disk, to reinstall in case you want to reformat? Thanks



and

- If we get a 256 ssd, it should be enough for MOST of her games/video editing software. What will the unused hdd do? Is it possible to deactivate it unless we need to "save" something on it, so that way it can reduce heat? Thanks in advance!

 

You do not need to purchase a new Windows 7 license to reinstall on the the same computer. I did a reinstall on a new msata just like you are looking to do and I activated it via phone with no issues at all.

 

So how did you do this? Did you uninstall windows on the last harddrive? Did you have a disc to install windows 7 onto your new drive? How did you get it onto your msata drive in the first place? Is this easy to do? Like can I just snap in my msata and go?

sorry for such noob questions. I'm in law school and don't have hours upon hours to researching computer hardware inquiries :-(