Can a 'system image' be restored to a drive with a different storage capacity?
First a remark: Even with a slow disk, it is not normal for the disk to always be at 100%. If the cause is system corruption or virus infection, then by reimaging this system you might only transfer the problem as-is to the SSD. I would therefore counsel to start with full system scans by several anti-virus products including at least Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, to do sfc /scannow and to examine the Event Viewer for error messages. If problems are found, better install Windows to the SSD from scratch rather than take the chance of doing all this for nothing.
Good and free imaging products exist that can do this migration, so you don't need a commercial product like Acronis. I would prefer using a third-party product rather than Windows Backup, because the later has too many gotchas and not enough support.
Before imaging the disk, I would first prepare the system disk to reduce its size :
- Move your personal data out of the disk
- Disable paging and hibernation, to reduce disk space (returning them after the migration)
- Empty the Recycle Bin
- Defragment the hard disk so as to consolidate unused space at its end
The free products I recommend for the transfer are :
- AOMEI Backupper
- Paragon Backup & Recovery 2014 Free
Do the backup using the smart or sector-by-sector method, so only used sectors are backup. This reduces the times of both backup and restore and makes likelier the successful transfer to a different-sized disk.
Study carefully the documentation of the backup/restore product that you choose. The documentation of both products should have advice regarding the migration to SSD.
Both products can create recovery boot media on CD. Create it on the target computer, and test carefully before proceeding. Verify that the restore boot can see the device on which the disk-image is stored.
These products can also partition the SSD disk, which is preferable to your doing it manually.
If you have another computer that can accept the SSD as a second hard-disk, you could do the restore on that computer, then move the disk to the target computer. In that case you wouldn't need the boot media.
- Yes, you can restore the larger drive to a smaller one. You should resize the partition on the larger drive so it will fit on the smaller one first. See here. You can do this with Disk Management in Windows, or you can use free tools like Gparted.
- HDD to SSD should be fine, it is really just another drive to the system (for the purposes of copying data).
- Which method you choose is more opinion. Seeing as Windows is taking 79GB and 100% of HDD access just to "browse the net, read emails, type up Word docs", I think you would benefit from a clean install. It will probably be more work to transfer all of the content to the new drive, but it maybe worth it in performance.
- If you decide to move the Windows installation, see this question about the options you have.
- Adding RAM to the system will also help if the disk access is due to the system running out of memory.