SSD (Solid State Drive) Upgrades and DV7 4280US

Question

I am posting this as an FYI for anyone who is considering upgrading their DV7 or similar laptop with a SSD.
My experience with this has been somewhat difficult and I am hoping this will help.
I own a DV7-4280US laptop with 6GB of memory, i5 processor, and an 750 GB 5400rpm drive. I decided to put a OZC Vertex 2 120GB drive in it to replace the main drive. I decided to do a fresh install of the factory image directly to the new drive. This failed. I was able to run the HP recovery disks and get all the way through without an error, but was not able to boot. The system stated that there was no valid boot disk. I tried several times with different options and always got the same error message when I tried to boot from the SSD.
The solution for me was to use partition wizard home edition (http://download.cnet.com/Partition-Wizard-Home-Edi​tion/3000-2094_4-10962200.html?tag=mncol;1) and to copy partition #1,2 and 4 over to the new drive (from my old drive in an external enclosure) resizing appropriately so the data all fit on the newer smaller drive. I was careful to make sure each partition was created as a primary partition not a logical one. I also had to make the first partition active as it contained the boot info for Win 7-64bit.
A note about partition size: before I copied the partitions over, I decided to uninstall some of the extra software I did not use that came from HP and a few that I had installed. I also deleted all of my temporary files and did a disk clean up. It is best to not fill your new SSD too quickly and to do as few writes as possible. It is the writing that consumes the drive over time and even if you copied the partition and then uninstalled and cleaned up you will have still consumed some of the life of your drive. I was able to trim my C: drive down to about 30 GB and have a lot of space left in the 111GB of that partition.
My guess is that the problem with the HP restore disks is that they for whatever reason did not set the first partition as active on the SSD. I have not been able to figure out why because they would do this correctly if it were any other type of drive. Maybe this is a bug with that restore program.
I also found that doing a fresh install of Win 7 form a microsoft disk works fine too.
I have been told by OCZ that if I have enough memory (4GB +) that I should set the page file to "No Paging File" in the advanced system settings. This will conserve the SSD as they have a limited number of writes and over time the page file will consume a good portion of it's life.
OCZ and Microsoft both recommended that I run the Windows Experience Index immediately after installing the SSD because it will turn off several prefetch and caching services that you will not need with your new SSD.
I have been super happy with my new SSD and am absolutely convinced that it is the very best upgrade you can do to speed up your system. My windows experience index went from 5.2 to 6.7 the disk is now rated at 7.6. Windows now loads in about 8 seconds and web pages are almost instantaneous. It is well worth the 200 I paid for the drive.

Answer 1

Hey...thanks for the information - I wish my search had come across your post earlier...it would have saved me a couple days of pulling my hair out!  I just bought a DV7-7298 (i7, 1T HDD, 12GB RAM, Win8 pre-installed) and similarly wanted to install an SSD (Intel 335 240GB).
The recovery disk option for intalling Win8 on the new drive got me nowhere at all - it would not boot except for once and I had no networking and major software installation issues which forced a reboot sequence and more terror...horribly frustrating and HP was absolutely no help.  I had a Windows 7 disk that I was able install on the SSD but no clean Win8 disk. I called Microsoft (who were quite helpful) - they were happy to allow me to download a fresh copy of Win8 with my existing Win8 Product Key...great, I thought...
With some aftermarket software I found the Win8 key which is attached electronically to the BIOS on these new machines - no more Product Key stickers on the bottom of our machines...the problem is that the OEM Key was not accepted by the Windows site to allow me to download the clean Win8 software...argh!  In the end, Microsoft helped again by agreeing to mail to me a Win8 install disk (which I though was decent of them)...not a quick solution, however.  In looking for solutions, I came across the Microsoft Win8 Pro upgrade offer ($40 until Jan. 31, 2013) - in order to potentially get this done, I decided to spend the $40 and get the upgrade which I downloaded and installed immediately...in the end?  Success!!  But not quite so fast...I had to install Windows7 on the SSD first in order to run the Win8Pro install which I'd put on the 1T drive that came with the machine - put it in an external drive...it installed without any issues.  I downloaded the drivers that Windows missed from the HP website and now have a slick, extremely fast notebook without all the bloatware...so sweet!
It is amazing just how fast these drives work - no regrets at all (except for the wasted time getting it working)...this is a great performance upgrade - if you want a faster machine and quick boot, this has got to be the best bang for the $!  With this DV7, I can still have the 1T drive in the second bay (battery power isn't a problem for me) so a lot of my data will be going there with programs on the SSD.  If you're considering this upgrade - great - do it for sure!  But do yourself a favour and don't waste time with the HP recovery disks...they just don't work for this upgrade...find someone with a clean Windows disk (XP, Vista (ugh2), 7 or 8) and install your OS that way.  If you have the UEFI BIOS Product Key set-up - it should activate itself (Win8).
Best of luck - you'll love the results!