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General discussion

Just upgraded my old laptop. Hard disk...

Aug 14, 2004 12:11PM PDT

My old Acer TravelMate 600TER just seemed too sluggish. I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was, but it did turn in boot times not unlike many other notebooks in its class.

But given how tuned it was, I suspected something wasn't quite right.

I found a hot deal on a 30GB 4200 drive, so I changed on the 11GB drive and the results paid off. Boot time dropped from 2 minutes to just about 65 seconds till the screen shows up. The drive used to stop about 4 plus minutes and now is under 3 minutes to drive stop.

A clue that the old drive has some issue is it took Norton's Ghost over 20 minutes to clone the drive. The new drive was loaded from the clone in 7 minutes.

I thought someone may take interest in the procedure to move to the new drive.

1. A spare desktop was found with a big enough hard disk to clone the old 11GB drive to with Ghost. A 2.5 inch drive adapter was used for the laptop drive.

2. The 11GB drive was cloned with Ghost to the desktop drive (yes that was destructive to the desktop drive contents, but what is backup for?)

3. The new 30GB drive was then put in the desktop and then cloned from the desktop drive.

4. The new 30Gb drive was put in the laptop and works fine. (using it now.)

Given the age of the laptop, I elected to stay under 32GB and not test the BIOS limits.

Hope you find this a little interesting.

The old 11GB drive will be recycled into a photo-drive for use with my camera.

Bob

Discussion is locked

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Re: Just upgraded my old laptop. Hard disk...
Aug 15, 2004 3:40AM PDT

I want to replace the existing HDD in my laptop. Is there a program that would need to be run to set the new HDD up or can I just plug it in and let the laptop recognize it and then begin installing the OS?

Thanks

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Installing the OS.
Aug 15, 2004 3:54AM PDT

For most you just put in the new hard disk and run the restore CD. If you stick in the sizes that the laptop supports, then it just works.

Installing the OS is not easy for some. But web sites are available for review.

Bob

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Re: Installing the OS.
Aug 15, 2004 4:03AM PDT

I've run the restore CD a number of times successfully on my laptop...well at least twice, anyway. This last time there must still be something leftover on the HDD because my antivirus and utility software just refuses to reinstall correctly. I think that when I registered the software it put something on my HDD.

Replacing the HDD is the simplist way I can think of to get the software to reload. I've been wanting a better, faster drive anyway.