Correctly and smart to install ssd clean

I'm on the verge to do a clean install and installing my new Samsung 830 128gb ssd. I always follow Hearts guide to do that, but when it comes for hdd driver, things get messy.

There are times when I delete, format drive, then install driver, windows setup give error it can't create system partition, or something like that.

If I install driver, the format, it works. But again, this order won't make sense.

So can anyone clarify what I should do?


@Hearts

This is exactly what I have, 830, Dolby Home, MSE, PM.
Any strategy for your awesome results?

 

Anyone?
Hearts?

 

Hi sorry for the late reply, to achieve a similar result follow my clean installation guide up to the Finalisation phase, don't forget to back up your activation and the DRIVERS folder (as well as the Dolby driver), personally I don't use System Update myself as I tend to prefer manually install drivers via the Device Manager (see the guide for details on this part).

When installing the drivers I don't use the installation package since the Device Manager knows what to do with them with the exception of the Dolby driver. Bear in mind my system doesn't come with Fingerprint so you maybe required to install that package if needed. If you have the NVIDIA GPU you may also need to install that driver using the package as well, I only have the Intel HD 3000 so I didn't need to use the installer. The only Lenovo apps I use is the Power Manager and Hotkeys Integration.

Afterwards I proceeded installing my applications and toggled the startup list via MSConfig to disable the ones I don't need automatically starting up. Generally I have these starting up on my T420:

- Microsoft Security Essentials (or your own antivirus app.)
- Dolby Home Theatre Profile Tuning App (not really necessary, a personal preference so I can change sound profiles on the fly.)
- Lenovo Hotkeys Integration
- Lenovo Power Manager
- Microsoft Gadgets (Again not necessary, but personally I use a CPU and Network monitoring gadget so I need this on.)

Don't forget to install Samsung's SSD Magician for SMART monitoring, it can also help you disable services such as disk defrag and disk indexing from the software. You don't really need to have this auto-starting up though so you can safely disable this from MSConfig.

Finally I toggle the services that I don't need with the help of Black Viper's Windows 7 Service guide, I generally follow the "Safe" section of the guide with a few extras of my own. Though I don't just blindly turn things off, read carefully whether you need them or not. So if you have Bluetooth for example don't turn this service off even though it said so in the guide!

 

oh...these are different from the your 1st pdf version long time ago..cool!

THanks a lot, I'll look into this!

 

Yeah the online guide supercedes my PDF guide, sorry for the confusion I try to make an offline version of that too when I have time.

 

Hey, no problem.
You have yours setup as UEFI Only?

 

Yeah I use UEFI on mine since I don't have a fingerprint sensor. Though if you have this feature then it's best to stick with the Legacy BIOS setup for compatibility.

 

I don't, so I should have good results like yours in the end.

 

Btw, what driver do you use for the Trackpoint?

 

Believe it or not, I don't use the Trackpoint driver from Lenovo. I just use the stock mouse driver from Microsoft as I found it to be pretty responsive (with mouse speed settings slightly speeded up) and it uses the middle button for page scrolling by default which I use personally.

Obviously if you prefer to use the middle trackpoint button for something else other than page scrolling then you probably would need to install the trackpoint driver to initialize that.