Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade

I'm upgrading my Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop hard drive from a 80GB to 100GB and I need the easiest way and most accurate of the "ghost" on any one drive to the other.

If you have a copy of Windows XP will say that you could pop the CD into your CD drive and click Perform Additional Tasks and then lick on transferring files and settings and follow the promt Or you can burn your files on a CD or if you'd like a hard drive exturnal you can copy all the files or any type of a file backup program would do .......... ps Make sure that widows XP verson is not a complete set degree

Without a third party application (like Ghost) here is the best way to do it. Back up all your important data on a CD-R or USB stick. You can manually put whatever you want to keep it there and just put on your hard drive when you receive new installed. There are other ways, but since you said that the easiest is the most fundamental.

You can buy a box from any computer store and place your hard drive of laptops out there and connect the new computer with a USB cable. Then you can transfer all data from the old hard disk to the new harddrive and then you can have an additional external hard drive (the old laptop hardrive) to use. This, in my experience is the easiest (not to mention cheapest) way, and you can still use your old hard drive

If you have one of these USB drives 4GB zip I would say that this would be the easiest way. Since I can connect my laptop to a network, it is easier for me to return everything to mount a network drive, but I do not think you have that option?