Laptop Hard Drive Upgrade

How to: laptop hard drive upgrade

Its best to do a little planning before you begin. I’m going to assume you’re upgrading the current drive, not replacing a broken one. More about that later.

If you’re not a computer professional, you must be comfortable opening up your laptop to replace the old drive with your new big fast drive. If that scares you stop here and call a friend or your local computer shop.

You should go for a larger drive than the current drive, which is probably why you’re here. I strongly suggest you consider buying a 7200 RPM drive for your laptop – why? I just finished upgrading my Dell Inspiron (which was a very basic laptop). It now runs almost 2 times faster! The 7200 RPM drives gets Windows and almost every application running faster. It’s a great way to get more performance for very little increase in cost. I suggest the Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM drives. You can buy them at some retailers (check before you go) or search on-line.

 

Before you begin your laptop hard drive upgrade, you should have:

• Patience, you don’t want to rush this
• Backup! Sometimes things can go wrong – is there anything on that laptop you can’t live without? (you should always have a backup anyway)
• the new disk drive to install
• software to copy your old disk ( a few suggestions on that)
• a cheap USB portable (2.5”) external case
• a grounding strap

Software for copying your old drive

I used a great package from Acronis called Migrate Easy. It automatically scans your old drive and automatically figures out how to copy everything from your old drive so you can just drop in the new drive and go – five stars IMO.