People have learned about SSD drives recently. This technology has been around since 1995, but until recently, the cost was too high to penetrate the masses. Today, every user can afford an SSD drive. If you are interested in replacing an SSD in a laptop, contact the professionals from Fortis Service.

Benefits of an SSD

SSD stands for solit-state drive - solid state drive. Their main difference from the usual hard drives- in contrast to the disk as such. An SSD is like a flash drive: it is made entirely of memory chips.

We present comparative characteristic solid state drives with traditional hard drives:

no moving parts. As a consequence, the absence of noise and high resistance to mechanical shock;

high speed read/write. SSD drives exploit potential SATA interfaces almost completely: 300-600 mb / s. It's 5-10 times faster conventional hard disks;

low power consumption;

compactness and light weight. If you replace the hard drive with an SSD, the laptop will become noticeably lighter;

high multitasking option;

high work stability.

The disadvantages include high price And limited time Services: On average, SSDs break down 20% faster than their hard drive predecessors.

installing ssd in laptop

By installing an SSD in your laptop, you will increase the speed and performance of your device. The response time will decrease by 3-6 times, the noise of operation will disappear and temporary freezes will disappear.

Please note that replacing the HDD with an SSD is not the only option. You also have the option of replacing the drive with an SSD drive. This way you can combine the old data with the new storage. You'll lose your DVD drive, but you'll get a super-fast memory slot that can hold your most important programs.

If you are having difficulty with choice of SSD drive, ask Fortis Service. Experts will help you choose perfect solution under your budget. Most often, we advise our customers to stay with Intel drives: they are fast, reliable and affordable and verified by consumer reviews.

Why Fortis Service?

Are you having trouble choosing an SSD? Not sure how best to proceed: replace the DVD drive or old HDD disk? Having trouble choosing a model? Our experts will answer any of your questions! Diagnostics of laptops and their delivery to the service is free.

To order services from us, you do not even need to leave your home! Make an order by phone, and the courier will pick up your laptop. Payment can be made non-cash. At a convenient time for you, the courier will bring the laptop back.

Fortis Service - professionals in their field. We do not wait for the spare parts in the warehouse to run out - we replenish it regularly. Available spare parts for all leading manufacturers of the world: Apple Macbook, Asus, DNS, Dell, DEXP, Samsung, HP, Lenovo and others. We do not take prepayment and are responsible for our work with a 3-month guarantee. Contact us!

The cost of repairing or replacing the case on a MacBook:

Types of jobs	Prices
Installing an SSD via optibay	2500
Installing an SSD instead of an HDD	1000
Prices for SSD (120/240/480/1TB)	from 3000 / from 3500 / from 5200 / from 10000
Installing an SSD in Asus laptops, Acer, Samsung	from 1000
SSD in Dell laptops, Toshiba, Msi	from 1000
SSD in macbook laptops, Sony Vaio	from 1200

The bottleneck in laptop performance is usually HDD 2.5 inch format and 5600 rpm. Therefore, there is no better upgrade for a laptop than replacing it. mechanical drive(HDD) to a solid state drive (SSD). The task is not trivial, but for the average user it raises many questions. If the thought of reinstalling Windows and all your programs, and then them fine tuning, confuses you, don't worry. After reading this article, and after an hour of work on replacing the disk, you will be able to enjoy positive results upgrade.

Checking a laptop before upgrading to an SSD

The process of upgrading a laptop to replace the hard drive with an SSD is quite simple. You just need to remove the installed HDD from the laptop and replace it with an SSD. If your laptop has a removable bottom panel then you are the luckiest. If you have an Ultrabook or your laptop does not have a removable bottom panel (for example, it can be sealed), then the process of removing the hard drive is somewhat more complicated. In the manual of your laptop, as a rule, you can always find The right way hard drive replacement. Sometimes I'll eat hard drive can be very complicated, but I'm sure that such laptops already have an SSD drive installed. Laptops where you can't just remove the back panel are hardly low or mid-range laptops. Most likely this is a premium level, which in most cases does not need such an upgrade.

Removed laptop back cover

For all other cases, the process of removing the back panel and extracting from the bowels laptop hard disk should not cause problems. I will touch on a little theory that you may need to remove the disk.

What do we need

SSD. Well, first of all, you need yourself SSD drive from right form factor under your laptop. The SSD must be large enough in case you want to clone your current HDD. I advise you to choose a disk with a capacity of 250 GB or more, and preferably 500 GB, if the price tag of 10,000 rubles does not scare you. For most people, 250 GB on a laptop should be enough for all tasks. You should not assume that this volume will be enough for you to store your personal video archive or music collection. The laptop is not for this purpose.

HDD/SSD adapter to a laptop. If you want to clone your hard drive, then you can't do without an external adapter. Suitable for this:

• Adapter for SSD/HDD 2.5" to CD/DVD drive;
• External adapter adapter controller for connecting HDD/SSD hard drives and CD/DVD optical drives. USB 2.0;
• Adapter for connecting HDD/SSD SATA III to USB 3.1 ports.

Such an adapter will be useful not only for SSD connections and organization of the cloning process, but will also turn your current hard drive into external storage, for example, to save a personal video archive or for backup.

Small Phillips screwdriver to take off back cover laptop and release the hard drive, and then fix the SSD.

Separate external hard disk(optional). You may need a hard drive of the same size or larger to provide storage for folders that will not fit on the SSD. It can also keep a full system backup just in case something goes wrong.

Preparing your HDD for cloning

We will make a small preparatory work on the current disk, as long as it is not removed yet.

1. Make a full system backup. Creation backup The system image in Windows 10 is done as follows. In the control panel, open the section system and safety, then open the section Backup and restore. Click the link on the left Creating a system image. Decide where you will store the image and go through all the steps of the wizard.

Creating a system image

2. Moving large folders. Most likely, your hard drive is larger than a brand new SSD. Therefore, large folders that contain photos, videos, games and personal documents are moved to external drive or another place to try to leave as much disk space as possible for cloning to SSD. I usually copy to hard drives a computer with much larger hard drives than a laptop. If you do not have a computer or adapter with external drive, then I advise you to copy to network drives to the Internet, such as Google Drive or .

3. Delete unnecessary files. Extra space to be taken up installed programs, we don't care. If you can easily reinstall them on the SSD in the future, feel free to delete them from the HDD. Large files, which you no longer need, but they lie simply because there is a place, it is also better to remove them. The cloning operation will be entertainingly faster. Additionally, I recommend cleaning the system of unnecessary system junk And temporary files free program CCleaner.

We connect SSD

We are now ready to connect the SSD to the laptop for the first time to carry out the cloning process.

1. Connect the SSD to the adapter. Depending on the type of adapter, install the SSD in the CD/DVD adapter case or connect to USB to SATA adapter, and then connect to your laptop.

Connect SSD to USB adapter

2. SSD initialization. If Windows does not display the new drive letter in Explorer after installing the driver, open the Control Panel and run the snap-in Disk Management. in a snap Disk Management You should see the SSD as new disk under your current drive. If it is not initialized, click right click mouse on the disk and select Initialize disk.

SSD initialization

3. Resize current section disk. We need to reduce the size of the current disk if it is larger than the SSD. Let's bring it to equal or smaller size. in a snap Disk Management check the primary partition of your current drive (usually drive C:, or another with installed system Windows) so that its size is no larger than SSD size. If it is not, then you need to compress it. Right-click on the operating system partition and select Shrink Volume. The compress current disk window will open. Click Compress.

Compress C:

This operation will allow you to resize the main partition so that the freed area on the disk is left as unallocated space. But don't worry about the unused area, during the cloning process we will resize the partition and include this unallocated space in the SSD volume.

After all operations, you must restart the laptop.

Clone HDD - 3 ways

Finally, the time has come for the most important operation, for which we have already gone through so much.

Selecting a disk cloning program.

Here we have several ways.

1 way

To do this, I use the EaseUS Todo Backup Free utility, which is free for personal use, It has user-friendly interface and also optimizes migration to SSD. Download the utility and run. Selecting a button clone, specify the source and target disk, then follow the instructions of the wizard and get a copy of the hard disk on the SSD.

EaseUS Todo Backup Free

Please note that you must check the option Optimize for SSD when choosing target disk. This ensures that the sectors are aligned on your SSD and improves your chances of booting from the SSD after the clone process.

On the next window, you will be able to compare the original drive with the SSD. As you can see below, EaseUs automatically configures for different sizes disks Unallocated space on the current disk.

Starting the clone process

Click the button Proceed, and then turn off the laptop when the operation is complete.

2 way

Since the release of the operating room Windows systems 7, a built-in utility appeared, using which you can clone the system to a new disk. We have already made a system image, in the chapter I described the process of creating a system image. After you need to select a link Create System Recovery Disc.

Create System Recovery Disc

We need this disk to load the System Restore Wizard. After the recovery disk is ready, we change the HDD to an SSD (in next section Let's look at this process) and boot from the recovery disk. Select the image that was created earlier and indicate that we will restore current disk. After this operation, you will have copied HDD disk to your SSD.

3 way

I want to offer a utility that is a whole combine for copying disks and partitions - Macrium Reflect. The features of the free version are enough for us, so we go to the official website and download the utility. If you want to get acquainted with all the features of the utility, then right on the site there is comparison table versions and their capabilities.

We launch the downloaded agent and start downloading the WinPE components.

Agent Macrium Reflect

After installation, launch the program window and create a system image or clone a disk, depending on whether you have an adapter for connecting external rigid discs and extra hard the disk needs the volume that was discussed. If there is, then we clone the current disk to a new SSD. If not, then create a disk image and restore it to the SSD.

Macrium Reflect

To perform all these operations, we need to create a recovery disk in the Macrium Reflect application itself. It is very easy to do this. In the application menu, select Other Task - Create Rescue Media. It will open the disk creation wizard, in which you need to complete all the steps step by step and create a disk with WinPE on board. This disk will allow you to boot and restore the system from the image.

Rescue Media Wizard

Replacing HDD with SSD

1. Turn off your laptop and remove back panel. Turn off your laptop and then unplug the power cable and any other connected cables, including the SSD. Then unscrew the back panel of the laptop and remove it to access the hard drive.

2. Unscrew the screws that secure the drive. You need to remove 2 or 4 screws before the drive can be removed.

3. Raise the hard drive to 45 degrees and pull it out to myself.

4. In its place, install an SSD and assemble the laptop in reverse order.

SSD Boot Test

Moment of Truth: Turn on your laptop. It should load an order of magnitude faster and at the same time you will see all the contents of the desktop as before it was before the upgrade. Moreover, all heavy applications should also now load almost instantly.

If you receive a death screen or a screen Maintenance, choose Diagnostics – Extra options – Download Options. If after that the system does not boot, then the disk was cloned unsuccessfully, try repeating all the operations again.

Now mount your storage with the archive folders created in step , and copy everything back. At the same time, you will be pleasantly surprised by the speed of copying.

October 23, 2012 at 19:50

Installing an SSD in a laptop

• DIY or DIY

The optical drive has a Slimline SATA connector. It would be possible to connect it with the “Slimline 13 Pin SATA Male to 22 Pin SATA Female Cable”, which would have to be expected from the cunning Chinese, but we are not looking for easy ways.
There is an elegant solution for rich Pinocchio: a 2.5"" HDD adapter basket (Espada SS12, similar to DX). With an SSD price of 1.5 kilorubles, buying a basket for 1 kiloruble looks unjustified, it was decided to collective farm our own.
I want to make a reservation that disassembling the laptop to the screw to change the disk (as I had to do) is not at all necessary, and it is even advisable to install the SSD in place optical drive, since cooling is not so hot there, and the energy consumption of an SSD is an order of magnitude lower than its mechanical predecessor. The above is true provided that the revision of the sata drive is not less than the revision sata port from the purchased SSD, otherwise everything advantages of SSD will eat the laptop's low-speed port.

Tools and materials:

1. DVD-drive for a laptop (it can be native, but a dead one from a service nearby is better);
2. Interface cable "sata";
3. Molex-SATA power adapter;
4. Soldering iron, tin-lead solder, flux;
5. Tester;
6. Screwdrivers
7. knife/cutter
8. hot glue;
9. Thermotubes / adhesive tape / electrical tape;
10. Relocatable HDD.

We definitely need solder, flux, a soldering iron, a tester, if they are not available, then there is no point in fencing something, it will not work on twists. The tools are inexpensive, then many more will come in handy. Flux must be acid-free passive for soldering radioelements (usually rosin). Active is not recommended. Everything is purchased at the hardware store.

It’s a pity to disassemble the native drive into organs, so we go to the nearest service and beg for a dead one from the masters. In St. Petersburg, you can go to Juno and walk around the ruins, I got the drive for a symbolic 200 rubles. Of the entire unit, we only need a housing and a connector, with which we will collectively farm our adapter.

We need a sata cable to connect our implanted disk to the adapter:
we cut it to a convenient length, clean it, tin the wires and solder it to the DVD controller board, from which all the giblets were previously pulled out. The desoldering lived on the cable and on the connector one to one.
for example, in the photo below from left to right: the 1st pin of the cable is connected to the 1st pin of the drive, the 2nd to the 2nd, and so on.

For convenience and magnification free space I heartlessly broke off the controller board along with the mounting holes. Since then, it has been securely attached to a greasy layer of hot-melt adhesive. When "processing" our board, you need to make sure that the edges of the dangling tracks do not come into contact with each other and with surrounding objects. Another reason why I broke off the board is the controller harness, which interferes with the operation of our adapter. Therefore, we break it so that the power and signal lines are also cut off and we are left with a board with a connector soldered on it. The broken board can be seen later.
In the photo below, you can see the sata cable with the plastic insulation removed, below it you can see two pairs of wires wrapped in copper foil. The foil needs to be unwound by 8-10 mm and cut off, under the foil there are 2 cores each, with a hot soldering iron tip we make a scar on the insulation 3-5 mm from the edge and quickly tear off the insulation, tin the bare ends and solder them to the connector itself. Whether to solder the screen is a purely personal matter, in my case, soldering was not required, it works like that. Hot glue is indispensable here: we use it to fasten the sata cable and power wires after soldering on our broken board. If you do not fix it, then everything will come off, we will not have time to assemble it.

The molex-SATA adapter is needed, you understand, to power our disk.

It is precisely because the optical drive has a non-standard power connector that we are engaged in this collective farm. To make it work, you need to make connections according to the following scheme:

Cut Molex. If standard conductors long enough and soft, you can leave them, otherwise we cut them almost to the root and build them up.

We cut off the yellow conductors, this is +12 power, our disk will do without it. Also, if you are sure that the ground on the disk is common to everyone (and, most likely, it is), then one of the black wires can also be cut off.
We clean, tin, solder a suitable cable of the required length, insulate with thermotubes. Red - + 5V, black - ground.

We solder the other end to our connector in the drive, do not confuse the polarity. You can find pads on the board and solder there. hallmark"Earths" are longer contacts.

Soldered, fixed with hot glue, try on:

It would be nice to glue the inner surface with electrically insulating material (adhesive tape?), It will prevent the implanted disk from shorting on the controller, but worsen the already unimportant heat transfer.
We tried it on, everything is fine, before the final installation we call all the connections with a tester for the presence of a contact where it should be, and the absence - where it should not be. We finally fix the board (hot glue). You can try on a disc. In order to be able to close the upper half of the case, you can cut the plastic compound of the connectors and bend/remove the sled along which the drive tray went out.

Let's all call again. We close the upper half of the case, fix the drive. In my case, no additional fixation was needed - the disk was firmly pressed. Carefully! When you press the cover of a working disk, you can clamp the spindle with the cover and ruin the HDD, data recovery will be problematic and expensive. Let's not forget that we collective farm for the sake of economy. When installing in a laptop, you can rearrange the mounting bracket, into which the fixing screw is screwed, from the native drive to the implanted one. Almost everything, it remains to insert the drive into the slot and secure it.

For aesthetics (so that no one would guess that we are collective farmers), holes in the side of our laptop can be covered with a panel from our native DVD. The panel is removable, on latches. We fasten it (no, not with hot glue) on double-sided tape!

Before booting, you should look into the BIOS and make sure that the device is defined. My disk was defined as ODD, I had to install a drive to boot from an SSD optical discs last in line boot devices.

In the operating system, as expected, everything is OK: SSD and HDD are defined as disk devices.

SSD or solid state drive is a hard drive that uses NAND chips as a storage medium, rather than magnetized platters, as in conventional HDD(Hard disk drive). That is, it does not have any reading heads, spindle, etc. There are absolutely no mechanical components.

An SSD is made up of several parts that are assembled and function well together. The first and most important part is the controller. It controls the operation of the drive and is a kind of "heart" of the device. The second part is a set of NAND flash memory, where all the recorded information is stored.

Since the controller controls absolutely all the processes of reading and writing to SSD drive, then the performance of the device directly depends on this part. Modern SSDs use controllers that have 4 to 10 channels for parallel connection memory chips. The more such channels, the higher the data recording speed will be.

The SSD also has its own cache memory. However, it is not used to increase the read speed, as is done with the HDD, but as a temporary data storage. To date, there are SSDs with 128, 256 and 512 MB of cache on board. What memory will be specifically used for the SSD depends on its volume. The larger the volume, the larger the cache, but the price will then be much higher.

What will replace HDD with SSD

If you replace today's obsolete HDD with a newer and more modern SSD, the laptop user will receive a significant reduction in time Windows boot. The increase in speed will be about 60% in relation to a conventional hard drive. All programs and applications will start working much faster. For example, Windows boots from an SSD in about 15 seconds after being turned on.

The laptop will last much longer on battery power if it has an SSD installed instead of an HDD. In addition, a solid state drive (SSD), due to the lack of a mechanical component, is able to withstand much more mechanical overloads.

Replacing HDD with SSD

Since all modern SSDs are made in the 2.5-inch form factor, replacing a standard laptop HDD is not difficult, because it has the same dimensions. First of all, turn off the laptop and remove the battery from it. Thus, you completely de-energize the device.

Now look carefully where the HDD is located. On all laptops, its location is usually indicated special badge. After determining the location, remove the screws and remove the cover. Usually, the HDD is additionally located in a special basket and is attached to it with screws, they should also be unscrewed.

Remove the HDD from a special basket, install an SSD instead and repeat the whole procedure in reverse order. Tighten all screws, replace all covers. Try to carefully remember which screws are from where, so that there is no confusion. Replace the battery and Charger. Be sure to install on a solid state drive new Windows, no need to transfer, clone or copy the old system with HDD. Since the old operating system was placed on the HDD, then the services there are launched to work with this particular device. On an SSD, not only will these services not speed up anything, but they can also contribute to faster disk wear.

Now that the laptop is assembled, turn it on and press F2 several times to get into the BIOS. Need to produce special settings for SSD. Locate the Advanced/Sata Configuration section. Set the mode AHCI works. In the Boot Priorities section, put the first boot USB drive or CD / DVD-drive, depending on what you are going to produce Windows installation. Save the settings by pressing F10, restart the laptop and proceed with the further installation of the system. Don't forget when choosing system disk specify the new SSD.

If your new computer with Windows 10 booting long time, then most likely it's because it runs on a regular hard drive. This also applies to most older computers. Do you know that replacing the hard drive with a solid state drive (SSD) will make the machine run much faster? It's true, a five year old computer with an SSD is much faster than even a brand new one running on a regular hard drive. Good news is that swapping out drives is pretty easy to do and not too expensive, thanks to the fact that SSD drives are now much more affordable than they were just a few years ago.

(A standard SSD looks like a traditional 2.5-inch laptop hard drive, but it's much faster.)

In this article, I'll show you how to replace your Windows computer's internal hard drive with an SSD while keeping your software, data, and settings intact The computer must be running Windows control 7, 8 or 10. Previously Windows versions SSD drives are not well supported. The steps in this article were done on Windows 10, which you can install, by the way, as a free upgrade until July 29, 2016, Macbook owners can check out.

General direction. The replacement process basically involves cloning the contents of an existing hard drive to an SSD, and then directly replacing the hard drive from the computer with an SSD. This is a similar process for desktop and laptop computers, although it is much easier to work with a desktop computer due to its large size.

Depending on how much data you have on your computer's main hard drive, this project will take anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours. You won't need to be actively involved most of this time.

A. Preparation.

There are a few things to consider for this job.

First, you obviously need an SSD. While not all SSDs are created equal, all solid state drives much faster than any conventional hard drive, so the differences between the two are irrelevant to someone replacing a conventional hard drive. However, with a drive try to buy the most capacious drive for the least money.

One important thing to keep in mind is make sure you buy an SSD with a higher capacity than the total amount of data you currently have on the hard drive you are replacing. This means, for example, that if your computer's main hard drive has a capacity of 1TB, but you've used about 200GB of it, then you just need an SSD with a capacity of about 240GB. You can buy a larger SSD or the same as your existing hard drive if you can afford it.

The second thing you need is cloning software. There are quite a few of these, and most of them work well (some SSDs come bundled with this kind of software), but my favorite is free version Macrium Reflect. This software allows you to clone an existing drive to a new one, even without restarting your computer. It also supports all types of hard drive formats.

The third thing you need is a USB-to-SATA adapter. These adapters can be found online for about $15 or so. If you have an external hard drive (whether portable or desktop), you can use its adapter part to work. Please note that for a desktop computer, as an option, you can not look for such an adapter and install an SSD as a secondary internal disk for the cloning process, which is much faster than a USB connection.

And finally, you will need a small screwdriver. Choose the one that fits the screws on your computer. As a rule, a standard small cross will do.

Additional preparation.

This step is only necessary if you want to use an old, used SSD (the one that was formatted before) to replace the existing hard drive on your computer. If you bought a new SSD, you can skip this step and go directly to the cloning process.

There are two types of disc formats. This is the Master Boot Record (MBR) used by Windows 7 and above. early versions, as well as the GUID Partition Table (GPT), which was adopted on Windows 8 and above later versions. (Note that Windows 8 and Windows 10 work with MBR too.) If you want to use a used SSD for your computer, you'll first need to convert it to the same disk format as your existing hard drive in order to process cloning. If not, the system may not boot in the end.

It's fairly easy to figure out what is using the computer's existing GPT or MBR hard drive. Here's how to do it.

1. Launch a command prompt. (Right click on the "Start" button and select "Command Prompt" or search in the menu "All Programs > Windows Tools").

diskpart then press Enter. (Answer yes to the control question accounts, if prompted.)

3. In the team diskpart line enter list disk, then press Enter.

You will see a list of disks installed in the system. If a drive is listed with an asterisk (*) in the GPT column, then it uses GPT. Otherwise, it is an MBR drive.

And here's how to make sure the SSD is of the same format type:

1. Launch a command prompt.

2. In the window command line enter diskmgmt then press Enter. This will open the Disk Management window.

3. In the disk management window, find the SSD, which will be shown as disk 1 (or disk 2, etc. depending on the number of disks you have on the machine). Right click on the SSD then select "Convert to GPT" (if the current drive uses MBR), or "Convert to MBR" (if the current one uses GPT.) Just make sure it's the same type of drive format as the existing hard drive .

B. Disk cloning.

Now that you have everything you need, let's begin this process. Insert the SSD into the computer's USB port using a USB-to-SATA cable.

(Note that the steps below are done on Macrium Reflect. With other versions or other cloning software, the steps will be slightly different, so follow the instructions of the software, but it should be easy enough to understand. The idea is that you are cloning existing HDD to SSD, keeping all settings.)

1. Download and install Macrium Refelct Free (link is above).

2. After installation is complete, double-click the Reflect icon on your desktop.

3. Under the icon existing computer, click on "Clone this disk..." This will open the clone window.

4. In the clone window, click "Select a disk to clone to..." then select the SSD that is connected to the computer via the USB port.

Additional note: Here you can check to make sure both disks are of the same disk format type (GPT or MBR). Also, if your existing hard drive has many small partitions and you are using an SSD of the same or smaller capacity, you may encounter an error saying that not all partitions can fit on the SSD. In this case, you can disable sections on the right side of the main section, which always has (C:) in its title. This is the partition that contains the operating system.

B. Replacing the hard drive with an SSD.

This last step involves removing an existing hard drive. On most laptops, this is conceived simply by placing the hard drive in a bay at the edge of the computer. You can pull it out after unscrewing a couple of screws on the bottom of the laptop. Sometimes hard drives are placed under the battery. With desktop computers, everything is easier, where hard drives (3.5-inch versions) are easy to detect as soon as the case cover is opened. You should refer to the user's manual or search the Internet for information on how to remove the hard drive from your particular computer. Please note that for desktop computers, some SSDs come with a 3.5" bay adapter to make them suitable for desktop use. However, if your SSD does not have such an adapter, you can leave the SSD hanging inside the computer case. Because SSDs don't have moving parts and a desktop computer is usually stationary, there's little to no harm in leaving an SSD hanging freely inside the case (just make sure it doesn't interfere with anything).

Once the old hard drive is removed and the SSD is installed, make sure you tighten all the screws when installing the SSD. In my experience, if you have a screw or two left, you've done something wrong.

Now that the SSD has been installed, keep the old hard drive in a safe place as a permanent backup. Or you can also use it with a USB-to-SATA adapter as an ongoing backup drive. IN desktop computer, you can actually still use an old hard drive as a secondary one if there is room for it inside the computer case.

Restart your computer several times so that the operating system gets used to new SSD. Don't worry, your computer will now boot noticeably faster.