Want to swap my HDD for an SSD, do I have to reinstall windows?

Most modern laptops come with a built-in way to factory reset and you could do that after swapping out the drive. Keep your old drive handy and you can swap it back in if anything goes wrong. There should be no need to make a Windows installation media like another comment suggested.

If you go this route, you'll want to spend a fair amount of time downloading Windows updates (will take lots of iterations of installing and rebooting with Windows Update) and install any programs or games you had on the old drive and still need.

You can also clone your current drive to the SSD using methods described in another comment and you should be able to swap them out and pick right up where you left off.

/r/techsupport Thread