Updating My Pavilion G6 Laptop

[Jammin1988]

Hello, I'm looking to update my Pavilion G6 laptop with a Solid State Drive. It currently runs on it's original HDD and at nearly 6 years old it's starting to slow down. Though I am able to fit the drives themselves as I've taken the laptop apart and put it back together again with no problems (Mostly to keep the fan clean) but just to make sure I don't screw things up, if I update to an SSD will I need to update the RAM with it, or the processor for it to make any difference?

It's currently running on an AMD A8 Processor (1.9GHz) with an 8GB RAM on a Windows 10 64-bit operating system. I don't really need any more than 8GB RAM but as it's the original unit, is it worth changing it?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@Jammin1988 

Whether or not an upgrade is "worth it" is entirely  a subjective question and one we can not possibly answer.

Will your PC performance improve with an SSD? Certainly!  Is that improvement worth the money you spent? We have no way of answering that.

I would not attempt to change the processor, as that will be very expensive, nor would I add more memory as 8GB is more than enough.

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR) from here: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
2) Connect the new drive to the PC using a USB-to-SSD drive adapter (like the one illustrated below)
3) Follow the instructions in this link: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Cloning+a+disk
4) Shutdown the PC when done
5) Swap the drives and reboot the PC.

NOTE: To do this easily, the SDD has to be the same capacity as the HDD.  IF you get an SDD that is a lot smaller, then before you do the cloning, you have to shrink the largest partition on the HDD (usually the OS partition), to the size such that it, and the other partitions, fit easily on the SSD.

You should boot from the new drive without any problems.

Typical USB-to-SSD adapter:

Good Luck

[Jammin1988]

Thank you WAWood, that was very helpful.

It was more a question of whether replacing one thing without the other would be pointless as it'll not make any difference. Thanks for the tip about the USB to SATA cable, and the link to the instructions, that's going to save me a lot of time and stress. Take care and stay safe.