To piggy back off of Chris's question about installing a secondary hard drive on Vista, I wanted to ask for advice on how to do the same as well as ask how this process might affect installing Windows 7. Please bear with me, this is my first time posting to a forum and I'm not sure how to succinctly ask my question.
I have a Lenovo T61 Thinkpad with Vista Home Premium Service Pack 2 32-bit operating system. I currently only have about 1 GB of space left on my 67.9 GB hard drive. I wanted to get rid of Vista and switch over to 7 but currently I do not have enough hard drive space to do that (I need at least 16 GB of free space.)
My first question concerns whether or not I should even switch over to 7. I already downloaded the ThinkVantage System Update 4.0 so I should have all the required device drivers and applications to install 7. I ran the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Report and there were known issues concerning Lenovo Utilities, System Update, and ThinkPad EasyEject Utility. On Lenovo's support website it says that "You can upgrade to Windows 7 without uninstalling these applications, but you might encounter problems when running them on Windows 7." When I looked for an alternative application that supports Windows 7, as advised, I found that there are none for the 3 known issues as the cause of the problem is a "limitation of Windows 7." So what the heck do I do? I hate Vista but I don't want to install 7 and then not be able to properly use my computer.
My second question is how to install a secondary hard drive. Regardless of whether or not I install Windows 7, I still need more hard drive space on my laptop as I'm done to like 1 GB.
I have read horror stories of Vista users trying to clone their hard drive so that they can easily upgrade their hard drive. I am particularly concerned with the problems I've read concerning having to manually partition drives and trouble making the cloned Vista drive bootable (I don't even know what that means exactly...) I'm not very good with computers so I don't want to get in over my head while trying to upgrade my hard drive.
Can anyone give my advice on how to clone a Vista hard drive and then install a second hard drive? Also, once I've installed the cloned Vista hard drive, should I anticipate any problems with upgrading to Windows 7?
Thanks in advance for your help!