Solid state drives are data storage devices that use solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional hard disk drive. Since SSDs have no moving parts, they're more rugged and shock-resistant than standard hard drives, which make them perfect for laptops. But SSDs are more expensive than traditional HDDs. Performing an upgrade to SSD drive is not that easy as buying a drive and inserting it in your Laptop. There are a few areas like picking out the right model, making sure that it will work with your setup, carefully cloning your old drive, and keeping the install process clean, which needs to be addressed well so that he upgrade process will be effective. First of all, determine if your laptop is well suited for a solid state drives or not. Make sure your laptop’s BIOS support SSD and the OS is optimized for SSD. OS like Windows XP and older ones are not optimized for SSD and it is not a good idea to have SSD for them. Also ensure that your laptop can be physically upgraded, since some older laptops don't allow for easy upgrading of the hard drives. If everything is ok and you have decided to upgrade, then choose the appropriate SSD from the wide array of SSDs available currently. If your laptop runs Windows Vista, make sure you've updated it to Service Pack 1. This will improve Vista's performance when running on the SSD. Windows 7 is still a better OS for SSDs, but Vista should work fine.Update your system BIOS. If your system is running in AHCI mode, try changing the BIOS storage access mode to IDE instead. Check your drive layout and leave the System Reserved and hidden restore partitions at their exact size, otherwise, the laptop might not boot properly. Back up your data and check the drive capacities. You may be moving from a higher-capacity hard disk drive to a lower-capacity SSD. If your current drive exceeds what the SSD can hold, you'll need to ditch some of your data. Back the files up to an external flash drives or burn them to CD or DVD if you need the information. Swapping out a laptop hard drive means that you somehow need to get the data off the old drive and onto the new one. You have several methods to choose from. 1. Get a small external hard-drive case with a USB interface. Install the new drive in the case, and then clone the old drive onto the new drive via USB. 2. Using a third, external drive, make an exact copy of the disk image on the old drive and copy it as a file to the external drive. Install the new drive and then reverse the process, copying the disk-image file from the external drive to the new drive. 3. Use an external device to make the drive clone and then after the cloning process is complete, swap in the new drive. Once the cloning or data transfer is done, open up your laptop and replace the existing HDD with this SSD. Now your laptop has done an upgrade to SSD and it should be working fine.