Laptop HD upgrade?

[Telstar]

Hi, I have a Toshiba Satellite 1905-S301 Laptop with a 40GB Hard Drive. I would like a bigger hard drive as I use my laptop as a desktop replacement as I move a lot and it is not feasible to own a desktop.

Now I am not a geek, it was at about the height of my ability to identify, locate and install more RAM so I am obviously a bit scared of how to find if and what I can to to upgrade my HD. I have searched around and seen drives of different specs of which I don't understand, Different RPMs IDE/ATA etc. Is there a search engine like there commonly are for suitable RAM upgrades. Can I upgrade to a faster Drive? Is there a limit on Size?

How hard is it to "clone" the contents from the old drive to the new one? Is it difficult to replace the drive?

Cheers.

[Saab Dastard]

Best bet is to go to the Toshiba website, support section, download the user manual for your laptop, look up the appendix for the specification of the hard drive.

It will probably be something along the lines of:

2.5" (length) 9.5mm and / or 12.7mm (height) IDE (interface) Ultra 100 (interface speed) DMA (supports Direct Memory Access).

Armed with this info, go shopping!

As to "Cloning" - yes you can get packages (e.g. Norton Ghost) to do this. Not necessarily the best way - depends on what O/S you have and what you want to have.

You can use the User Settings and Files Migration Wizard that ships with XP - run on existing, create transfer file, then run on new to import. Suggest a visit to Microsoft.com, they have some experience with the Windows O/S. Note - if more than one account on existing laptop, then you must run the wizard for EACH AND EVERY account, as it only extracts details for CURRENT USER!

What I suggest is that you buy an external USB disk caddy to put the old disk in. Then you can copy data directly from old to new, after you do a clean install from O/S up on the new disk.