Advice please re Vostro 15 3568 and my confusion re Secure boot, Bitlocker and Acronis.

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@old_Bean  Last thing I meant to ask but managed to forget while getting wrapped up in the imaging aspect of all this: You say this is motivated by complaints of a slow system.  In that case, why are you upgrading to Windows 10 Pro?  It won't run any faster than Windows 10 Home, so unless you specifically need features that are exclusive to Pro, I'd save your cash there.

@old_Bean  Apologies, I just realized that I misread your post.  I thought you were migrating to a new system.  I now see that you're just swapping some hardware.  In that case, you don't have to worry about the "transplant" concerns.  But it would still be a waste of time to install Windows 10 clean onto the SSD before restoring the image onto it. What I would suggest instead would be this:

• Optionally disable Device Encryption if you want to keep it simpler.
• Capture an image backup of the existing SSD.
• Swap the hardware.
• Boot the system from your Acronis media and restore the image backup onto the new, blank SSD.
• Perform an in-place upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro.

Another variation you can consider would be capturing the image backup from within Windows by having Acronis installed on that system.  In that case, even with BitLocker still enabled, the image backup will work just like a regular backup because Acronis running within Windows will be able to see the disk in its unlocked form.  That then means that when you restore it, the restored SSD will be unencrypted, so if you want to keep encryption, make sure you enable that afterward.  If on the other hand you don't have a current version or available license of Acronis to install on this system and therefore have to use existing bootable media, then you can either disable encryption or figure out how to unlock a BitLocker partition inside the Acronis bootable environment.  But if you're working with existing Acronis media rather than a current release, then you might have Secure Boot issues depending on which version of Windows PE your bootable media is using.

@old_Bean  If you're not set on using Acronis, you might want to consider using Macrium Reflect Free, which has very robust support for BitLocker, including some unique capabilities such as being able to restore a partition image backup into an existing target partition that already has BitLocker while maintaining that target partition's existing encryption.  But I'll address what I can here in general terms.

First, Secure Boot should not be a hurdle here, nor should you disable it.  Secure Boot only makes sure that the bootloader you're booting from was signed by a trusted authority and has not been altered since that signature.  Secure Boot has been supported since Windows 8, and therefore since its corresponding Windows PE 4.0, which uses the same kernel.  Any Acronis bootable media created today would likely be using Windows PE 10 (Windows 10 kernel), which of course will also support Secure Boot.  As long as you're not using the ancient Windows PE 3.1 (Windows 7 kernel), you should be fine getting your system to boot your Acronis media while Secure Boot is enabled.

In terms of capturing an image backup, if you boot into your Acronis media and capture it that way, then you'd be capturing the partition in its locked state.  That is not particularly desirable because in a locked state, Acronis won't be able to differentiate between sectors that actually contain meaningful data vs. empty space, so it will have to back up every sector of the BitLockered partition.  Depending on the capabilities of the Acronis bootable media, you could potentially unlock the BitLockered partition in that environment and THEN capture an image backup, in which case the backup would work just like a non-BitLockered partition.  Macrium Reflect can do this, but I don't know about Acronis.  Or if you're really worried about this, you could simply turn off BitLocker before you capture the backup and then turn it on later if you need to keep that system encrypted.

In terms of restoring to the new system, if you're capturing an image backup of your source system, there is absolutely no point installing Windows 10 on the new system before restoring your backup onto it, because an image restore is going to blow away anything you've set up on the target beforehand.  It's entirely possible to restore an image backup onto a completely empty, uninitialized disk.  (EDIT: This next segment no longer applies to this specific case of swapping hardware in an existing system rather than moving to a completely separate system.) There is no way to "merge" your old system's backup into your new system's existing setup such that your applications and data carry over, but your new system's Windows installation and drivers are left intact.  If that comes as a surprise to you, then you may want to rethink your strategy here, because if you restore an image backup, you'll be restoring your old system's Windows installation and drivers to that new system.  If the new system doesn't have a license for the same Windows version and edition (Home vs. Pro) that you restored from your old system, then the old system's Windows environment likely won't activate on the new system.  And you'll need to install any drivers appropriate to the new system AFTER you perform this restore, since your old system's Windows environment won't have those.  Lastly, depending on how the hardware compares, a Windows environment originally set up on one system might not boot at all when "transplanted" to a new system.  Macrium Reflect has a utility called ReDeploy that is expressly designed to address this by making offline modifications to the restored Windows environment to get it to load the appropriate boot-critical drivers, including injecting drivers into the restored Windows environment if needed.

Hopefully this helps!

Thank you JPHughan,

I appreciate your thoughts and ideas, and your explanations around Secure Boot were very helpful and reassuring.

One quick question...  does Disabling Encryption cause any issues to watch out for - e.g.can I simply turn it back on again afterwards without causing problems?

Thank you all for your help so far.  I appreciate the info.

The Vostro is simply slow. I have run the diagnostics and no issues came to light. Therefore I am starting from the position that the hardware seems ok, and as a rough indicator of the hardware, Speccy indicates things like memory, temperature etc seem normal.

I have checked for the usual things like Malware, defragging and I'm currently taking time checking what loads after the boot.

I will be talking to my daughter this weekend with the intention of arranging a date to Reset or Reinstall Windows using the Dell procedure and see if that cures the issue.

Thank you.  I have replied today.  Sorry about delay in replying.