Need help swapping to SSD

[michaelp]

I was thinking of swapping my laptops HDD for an SSD I have lying around and putting the HDD into a caddy for storage. However I don't want to have to do a fresh install of my OS, programs and games.

So the question is can I do some sort of clone of the things that I would like to transfer to the new SSD. Then what would happen if i tried running a program off of the caddy would i need to recreate all my shortcuts and such to match the new file path?

It seems pretty troublesome swapping to an SSD when Im not installing everything fresh.

 

[michaelp]

500gb used on the HDD only got 240gb on the SSD the biggest issue with a fresh install is all the games I would need to re-download from steam and then there's wanting to keep the same save game.