You have all been very helpful to me in the past and I thank you.  I have another question.  I bought and installed an 1TB SSD Hard Drive that I figued I would just put MSFS on that, for the sake of speed.  But its such a large hard drive I would still have about 850GB of free space left.  So after reading around, I see that I could move Windows 10 over to the new SSD card, which everyone says speeds up boot time and helps other programs run quicker also.  Sounds like a good idea.  However, I only want to move Windows to the new drive for now.  I DO NOT WANT TO CLONE MY ENTIRE HDD DRIVE.  I want to leave my files and all installed programs in the HDD drive for now.  Is this possible?  Can I move Windows into the SSD drive and also install FS2020 on it and leave it at that?  Will the programs that are currently on the HDD drive know how to work if Windows is now on a different drive?  And would they indeed work more efficiently?  I don't want to uninstall my programs from the HDD card and reinstall them on the SSD card because I would lose all of the settings and customizations that the program has acquired over the years.  Also, does the drive letter of the hard drive that Windows is installed on automatically become the "C" drive? Does that cause a problem when a program is looking for a file that is no longer on that new "C" drive? Can anyone help me figure out what I'm talking about and what to do?  Thanks, Dave

Hello,

I would do a complete reinstall on your ssd.
Internet and search engines will help you a lot with hundreds of tutos explaining how to back up your parameters, programs, registry, before doing a clean W10 install, and then how to restore your parameters, etc ...
It's rather easy !

You can lately install  programs on another drive, but C:\ will always be your system partition ! -

What you want to keep (programs on actual C drive) is impossible : registry and parameters will conflict with what will become D or E: or F : ...

What kind of drive is your current C:-drive? Is that also an SSD?
In that case I would recommend keeping everything as it is, and just install MSFS on your new drive. You could also move other games over to the new drive to make better use of it.

You cannot simply move Windows 10 over to the new drive, unless you clone the entire drive. I don't know why you don't want to clone, since that is the easiest way to get going. The alternative, and something I would prefer, is to install Windows on the new drive, install all software and then copy all customisations and settings over from the old drive. Most of these settings are the ProgramData folder or your own profile folder.

There is no (easy) way to do as you suggest, to only have Windows on the new drive and keep the old software working. Off course it is not impossible, but involves much more work that reïnstalling everything, and you're bound to do a lot of troubleshooting to get certain applications working, especially if these also depend on services (Adobe springs to mind).

Edited February 1, 20215 yr by orchestra_nl

When you say speed up, only loading will be slightly faster once loaded no difference your sim will not run faster that`s more down to your CPU & GPU. 

If you are determined to use the new SSD to its fullest, I would clone the existing Windows hard drive and put that on the new SSD first.

Then if you have space left, I would create a new logical partition on the new SSD and host FS2020 there.

Then you have the existing drive for what other purposes you need.

 

Also as  Raymond stated, the benefit of moving FS2020 to the SSD would be to improve loading times when FS starts but that wont give you a great benefit in increasing your in-game performance.