Help installing new hard drive on laptop

At a minimum: You can buy adapters that allow you to hook up laptop drives to regular computers. You would need to remove the existing hard drive, attach it to a regular pc with this adapter, then take an image of it onto the PC's hard drive.

Next, you would replace the old hard drive with the new one, and copy the image from the PC's hard drive to the new laptop drive. Finally you would put the drive in the laptop and configure the BIOS to recognize it.

You may also have to do something with the disk administrator in Windows 2000 or XP--I don't know what operating system you are running.

It is virtually impossible to explain in more detail. Even if I succeeded, your eyes would be glazed within 2 paragraphs and you would not be able to absorb the other 300,000 lines... also, you should not be attempting to do this with live data if you have no prior experience.

A couple of thoughts:
1. Take it to a local computer store along with the new hard drive, where they will do this for you for $50 or $100 bucks. Since it's a laptop, it just can't get any easier. It's also the right thing to do. They will have other pc's there with spare disk capacity so they can back up your disk before doing anything.

2. If you filled up 30gb, you will fill up 40gb within a couple of weeks. You think car vids take up room? Wait till you start getting into video editing. Go for at least 80, preferably 160. That will give you some breathing room.

Spend the nominal sum and do it right, or it could end in tears. It all depends on how much the data is worth to you. That's the best advice I can give.

 

First, some alternatives:
Is 40GB going to be enough? You might want to think about a bigger drive if you can afford it. The space gets eaten up fast with video. I have almost 200GB on my desktop and I still need more space. Also, do you mainly use this computer at home? If so, and you have a computer that has space on it, you can create a share on that computer and map it as a drive on your laptop. Whenever you're on your home network, you'll have access to that drive.

Easiest way to do what you want to do is to find a computer that has 30 gigs worth of space on it. Create a share. On your laptop, run the windows backup program (start - programs - accessories - system tools - backup). Click on the backup tab. Put a check mark on the C drive (which will back up all your data) and (more importantly) put a check on the system state. For "backup media or filename" enter the path to the share and the filename you want created... ie, \\desktop\share\backup.bkf. Click start backup. That'll take a LONG time. When it's done, replace the harddrive (very easy, it's on the side, there's a little screw, unscrew it, pull out the drive, replace the drive, screw it back in) and reinstall windows 2000 or xp or whatever came with your system, from the disc that came with your laptop. FYI, your product key should be on the bottom of the laptop. After reinstalling, run windows backup again, then click on the restore wizard. Should be self explanatory.

Personally, if I had the laptop home most of the time or had data that I didn't need all the time, I'd get a cheap desktop with a HUGE harddrive and map it as a drive on the laptop. It would be a lot cheaper than the equivalent laptop hard drive.

Don't forget - if you order from Dell, get it through Dell Small Business, and there's 10% off notebook accessories (ending today!) and free shipping on orders over $50.