I’ve been Googling for the better part of two days and I’m having a hard time understanding what I need to do.

Long story short, my computer crashed and I bought a new hard drive thinking that was the issue. It wasn’t. After replacing my motherboard, cpu, and power supply, I want to use my new drive (ssd) instead of my old one (hdd). I have no money to spend on this, but I have all of my most important files on a 64 gb flash drive. I don’t want to save anything on either hard drive, I just want to wipe them both and reinstall windows (I have windows flash drive ready).

Long story long, my computer started to wig out and overheat randomly during the most recent group of Windows Update. I saw someone online say my hard drive might be corrupted. After replacing the hard drive, it turned out that wasn’t the problem. My roommate, who works in software tech support, took my system apart and told me EITHER my cpu or my motherboard was the problem, but she couldn’t narrow it down. Being that the computer was old already, I replaced pretty much everything. I plugged my hdd back in to see if I could access my files, and I could. I transferred all of the things I want to keep, and now I want my windows moved to my new ssd hard drive. There are apparently a few ways to do this, but again, after purchasing my computer I do not have anything else to spend to migrate my windows files. The only way I saw that would work without paying for software involved an external hard drive that I ALSO don’t have.

If it would just make things a lot easier, I’ll toss my old drive entirely, but if I can keep it, I’d like to for the extra storage.

I’ve never done this before and almost every answer out there wants to sell me software that I can’t afford and don’t want. Can someone point me to a simple step by step in layman’s terms?