Questions re: Christmas upgrade

[micahbrusse]

Greetings all. I've purchased some components for a Christmas upgrade to my son's machine. I put the system together for him several years ago and now it's time to move on. I've got a new CPU, motherboard, RAM, graphics card, and an SSD. I'd like to transfer his OS and games to the new SSD while keeping his data on the existing hard drive but don't know of any potential problems or preparations I need to keep in mind before switching things out. Any advice would be much appreciated; thanks!

 

[Lutfij]

It's best if you start with a clean install of the OS. There are far too many failure/horror stories of cloning software's messing up both the donor drive and applicant drive to warrant a clean install after all the run arounds. If anything, back up all critical data onto an external, removable drive and then migrate them to the upgrade drives after you perform the clean OS install.

Might it be able to pass on your full system's specs to see if your hardware is alright?

 

[micahbrusse]

It's best if you start with a clean install of the OS. There are far too many failure/horror stories of cloning software's messing up both the donor drive and applicant drive to warrant a clean install after all the run arounds. If anything, back up all critical data onto an external, removable drive and then migrate them to the upgrade drives after you perform the clean OS install.

Might it be able to pass on your full system's specs to see if your hardware is alright?

Thanks for the quick response! That all makes perfect sense; I was just hoping it might be easier than starting over again. 😉 Here's the specs for the new parts:

AMD RYZEN 5 1600 6-Core 3.2 GHz (3.6 GHz Turbo)
GIGABYTE GA-AB350-GAMING 3 (rev. 1.0) AM4 AMD B350 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
Crucial MX300 2.5" 525GB SATA III 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive
EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 SC GAMING, ACX 2.0 (Single Fan), 06G-P4-6163-KR, 6GB GDDR5
G.SKILL Flare X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600)
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OS: Windows 10
HDD: Western Digital 750GB, currently separated into 2 (relatively full) partitions
PSU: Corsair GS600