You can clone the old drive to the SSD and once you have it booting with the SSD, you can wipe the old drive. You'll probably need to choose the boot drive in the BIOS to get it booting off the SSD. Or if you have a usb to sata adapter, you can remove the old drive, boot off the SSD, then connect the old drive via USB and wipe it before reinstalling it.
I've had good luck with the free version of Macrium Reflect for doing the cloning on two different laptops so far (new SSD drives)... http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx