Upgrading a Laptop Hard Disk - Page 5

I'm guessing that parcel has *finally* arrived now, right? Okey dokey, lets update that disk! First things first, lest see what the current disk looks like on the laptop we're upgrading. The laptop in question is my girlfriend's Acer Aspire 5630, which came with a 120GB disk (with around 5GB used for an ACER backup partition):

Here you can see the extra hidden recovery partition in the Disk Management Console.

Now at first glance that doesn't look too bad does it, so why the upgrade? Well the above is after a major little tidy up in preparation for this upgrade. And while several Gigabytes of temporary files were deleted, the amount of space still isn't anywhere near 'comfortable' for my girlfriend (who very often fills a 1-2GB memory card with high-res images in her swanky camera, and then dumps the whole lot on her laptop).

Now we know where we stand, let's install Acronis True Image on the laptop. It's a very straightforward process, just click next a few times and restart the machine when prompted. While the laptop is restarting, let's install the new hard disk into the disk caddy.

Click the image to enlarge

The model we're using here only has a couple of screws, so it's quite a quick process to open the case, push the adapter onto the new hard disk, and then slip the lot back into the case.

Click the image to enlarge

After replacing the screws, it's ready to plug into the laptop via the USB cable provided.

Click the image to enlarge

*note* At this point, Windows will install the hardware, but you won't 'see' any new disk drives in My Computer - this is normal (only after there's a formatted partition on the disk will anything appear in My Computer).

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Article Navigation:

• Introduction
• Preparation
• Getting The Right Disk For The Job
• Shopping!
• Clone Wars
• A Disky Exchange
• Activation
• Waste Not, Want Not
• Until Next Time