Upgrading a Laptop Hard Disk - Page 8

With the laptop fully powered down, the first task is the locate and remove the old disk - something which should be pretty simple if you opened the laptop up before now to check what sort of interface it uses.

Freeing the disk from its little cage.

Carefully remove the disk from its cage (if it has one), and remove any interface adapters if they are used in your machine (take extra care with this, as finding a replacement adapter might be tricky if you break it!):

Click to enlarge the image.

Once the old disk is removed, take the new disk out of the caddy and put it into the cage in the same way as the old one. After it's screwed in correctly, pop the disk back into the laptop by reversing what you did to get it out. Once everything is securely screwed or clipped back in place, you can turn the laptop back over and start it up.

And here we are, the fruits of our labour (well, a few mouse clicks and half an hour of waiting while Acronis did all the hard work...):

There, much better!

A quick side note; with Vista, you may find that Windows tells you it's not activated anymore. No need to panic though, as reactivation is as simple as a couple of mouse clicks! To check if you're still activated, go to Control Panel>System, and scroll down to the bottom. If it says you have x number of days to activate, just ensure you're connected to the internet, then click 'Activate Windows Now'. Click Continue if prompted by UAC, then choose 'Activate Windows Online Now'. A few seconds later and you're done.

Strictly speaking, you shouldn't actually need to re-activate after just swapping the hard disk though, and should only encounter this if you upgrade something else at the same time as the disk (such as the RAM). But since simultaneous upgrades are a possibility, I decided to include this just so there are no little surprises.

Once you're sure the new disk is working correctly, and preferably after a backup has been made, you can start to think about what you want to do with that old disk. The obvious choice would be to pop it into the caddy and use it as a portable USB hard disk (after deleting the existing partitions and reformatting). Even if it's a rather old 20GB model, that's still a fair bit bigger than most easily affordable USB flash drives, and it's free!

I hope you've liked that little walkthrough, and even if you don't go through with upgrading your own disk just yet, hopefully you'll be less reluctant to consider doing so in the future now.

And for those who have updated their laptop hard disks using this guide, I hope you now enjoy many years of use from that bigger, faster and quieter disk.

<<< Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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