SSD in G74SX

[mavigozler]

Over the years I've had this heavily used machine, I have replaced the drives with spinning magnetic disks

I got a Western Digital 500GB SSD with my fingers crossed.
The OS (C: ) drive was transferred via Clonezilla.
It boots up well, and everything works OK for a while.
Then things like taskbar applications stop working ("bad instruction").
Then the video adapter goes blacks out, goes into low res mode.
Then the screen quickly goes to black. Not even a cursor is seen.
Ctrl-Alt-Del and Ctrl-Shift-Esc do nothing.
There has only been one or two BSODs

chkdsk c: /f /r and 'sfc /scannow' were done.
Haven't had time yet to run memtest...not sure if it would help

My G74SX has no hardware changes/upgrades/modifications

BIOS setting needs to be changed? Suggestions?

[jdfrench3]

So when you restore your original OS drive, all problems disappear?

I assume the WD SSD you bought is a SATA SSD?

I recommend you use Macrium Reflect Free Edition to clone your OS drive.

[Clintlgm]

mavigozler wrote:
Over the years I've had this heavily used machine, I have replaced the drives with spinning magnetic disks

I got a Western Digital 500GB SSD with my fingers crossed.
The OS (C: ) drive was transferred via Clonezilla.
It boots up well, and everything works OK for a while.
Then things like taskbar applications stop working ("bad instruction").
Then the video adapter goes blacks out, goes into low res mode.
Then the screen quickly goes to black. Not even a cursor is seen.
Ctrl-Alt-Del and Ctrl-Shift-Esc do nothing.
There has only been one or two BSODs

chkdsk c: /f /r and 'sfc /scannow' were done.
Haven't had time yet to run memtest...not sure if it would help

My G74SX has no hardware changes/upgrades/modifications

BIOS setting needs to be changed? Suggestions?

Yes changing your SATA Hard drive for a SATA SSD should be no problem they both work through the SATA Controller it doesn't know the difference. If you having issue with Clonezilla I would give Macrium Reflect a shot Its never failed me since 2012 when i found it.
The issues your taking about soundl more like OS and Hardware drivers issues or failures

[mavigozler]

[Thanks to those who replied!

The SSD C: partition appears to be stable now

Here's what I did:

1. Cloned it again with Macrium Reflect (free version) as suggested
There were still a problem though, although I also intended to do driver updates of everything

2. First driver update was the video adapter, which had caused no problems for more than 5 years
a) I did the update using Windows update tool, and sure enough, it found an updated version
b) Then I went to the NVIDIA site directly and did the update of the GeForce 560M

3. Next driver update was going to Intel site to do chipset and wifi adapter drivers: everything already current

4. Windows 10 already knows how to optimize everything else for an SSD: disable Superfetch service, disable hibernate. The only thing it does not set is the power plan, which I changed from "Balanced" to "High Performance" and to disable indexing of the files, which I did.


At this point we are stable and I think the problem is resolved