OK...
Specs are:
HP 8570P EliteBook running Windows 7 Pro
Intel Core i5, 2.5 Ghz
320 GB HD
8 GB RAM
I don't anticipate ever needing a larger hard drive for this thing. It's primarily a travel/entertainment/convenience computer, but considering that I can get a 500 GB drive for about $70 these days I figure why not.
If the new drive is larger, Clonezilla is free and you don't have to muck with on the fly resizing of partitions.
Contemplate going to Win 10 soon.
If you got nothin' in the way of extra hardware, look into the
SanDisk SSD Notebook Upgrade Tool Kit . Inexpensive, includes some software or other, plus the usb to sata cable.
Now that I'm at work, I can see that the other guys are using a tool from Paragon or Easus to do their cloning. I hear them sometimes say "oh, the clone didn't work the first time I tried it". I use Linux based tools, usually ddrescue, and do partition resizing if necessary as a separate step. Not for beginners. No failures when I do it my way.
Plain old Windows 7 backup will work for this too. Full image, then install the SSD, boot from a win7 install disk, pick repair, and recover from backup.