cloning my old hard drive to a new ssd - what software?

After it's done, unplug the old drive and boot from the SSD on its own the first time, or set it as the first boot drive in BIOS. If both are connected and identical, Windows can get confused about which one it's running from. One more - ignore older guides telling you to use Macrium Reflect Free. That was discontinued.

Check who made the SSD first. Samsung has its own Data Migration tool, and Crucial and WD both give you a free cut-down Acronis that only works when one of their drives is connected. Those are the least fuss. If it's a no-name drive, Clonezilla is free and reliable, just not pretty - it boots off a USB stick and is all text menus. A couple of things that trip people up: - the SSD only needs to be bigger than the space you've USED, not the whole old drive, but the tool may make you shrink the partition first - on a laptop with one bay you'll need a cheap USB enclosure or adapter for the new drive during the clone - after swapping, if it won't boot, check the boot order in the BIOS is pointing at the new drive Run chkdsk on the old drive before you start. Cloning a drive with bad sectors is where most failures come from.