Question about cloning/ghosting

[Tumble]

Hey guys, need to reinstall my system - current install is roughly 4 years old! Can't be bothered starting from scratch again so I was looking to use a cloning prog to squirt the current config onto a shiny new drive.... Question is, would I just get the same niggly faults slowing down the boot etc or can I install fresh onto the new drive and then squirt the data onto it so it's LIKE a fresh install, without the legwork? Never used anything like this in the past, so a complete n00b

[Agent]

A clone will simply take what you have and move it to another drive. Any speed advantage would purely be from a faster drive.

If any slowdowns you're getting is due to your Windows install being a bit bogged down, then that's a separate unrelated issue.

Having said that, less people are noticing the latter now when (and if) you're going from spindle -> SSD, as the speed of the access time of a SSD is so good it just ploughs through the requests.

[Funkstar]

"niggly faults slowing down the boot"

My first thoughts would be issues that would not be solved by ghosting to another drive (same drives, same faults) and would not be solved by moving to SSD, the SSD would get you to that point quicker, but it will stop while the driver tries to initialise and fails (for example).

I've never been a great fan of ghosting to another drive, especially if it isn't something you need to do on a regular basis. Sure if you are testing hardware configurations or some such, but after 4 years I would just suck it up and do a nice clean install from fresh. That's what I'll do when I eventually put an SSD in my desktop. W7 is running fine, but I know there is a lot of crap installed that I don't need any more. Yes I could just un-install, but I still believe it's better to start from clean one in a while.

[wasabi]

Ghosting / Acronis imaging only really works if you have a good source machine. It is very unlikely in itself to fix issues. Best bet is to start again then import stuff into matching folders in your user profile after new software installed. All a big faff.

[Tumble]

I thought that might be the case. Thanks chaps