The reason you can't shrink the 750GB partition down further is probably because of file fragmentation.
Each partition needs to be in a continuous section of the hard drive, and I'm guessing you had more data on the drive before which you cleaned up, but what's left is scattered across the drive and preventing you from scaling back past 450GB or so.
Running the standard Windows defragger may help, but won't move "unmovable files" like the swap partition and the hibernate partition.
A couple of things to try:
Disable swap file and hibernation, reboot, defrag, then shrink, and finally re-enable swap and hibernation.
Use GPartEd - A free, bootable Linux distro that has some excellent partitioning tools that can do non-destructive resizing. I've used this successfully more than once, but I've also had it go horribly, horribly wrong (rendered my HDD non-bootable), so take care.
Apparently the trial version of PerfectDisk can defrag "unmovable" files and get you to a state where you could resize the partition.
PerfectDisk claims to have a defragmenting tool for SSDs. This is unnecessary and probably harmful. By all means try it to resize your HDD partition but then get rid of it!
For the actual cloning, I've always had good results with Casper.
tl;dr Just do a clean install on the SSD. How hard could it be?