Originally Posted by
hellsbrink
Fitting should be VERY easy, normally you only undo a couple of small screws, remove a small cover and there you have the drive which might be in some sort of caddy meaning there's some more screws to remove, I don't have a Sony laptop so I can't be more specific. But it uis generally a very simple operation.
That's where things fall down. Sony have the unerring habit of cocking up the design of their laptops so that you end up dismantling almost the entire thing to replace the most trivial of parts. Hopefully your Vaio is easier than the last 2 Vaios I had to deal with, but neither of those were particularly trivial. Good luck.
Also, where Hellsbrink says "bigger is better" for hard disks, I would say that spin speed is a pretty good pointer to general satisfaction with a hard drive. A 5400rpm drive is probably what you had from new in that laptop, but replacing it with a 7200rpm drive will bring noticeable speed improvements (as a laptop's slowest component is the hard drive). If you want to treat yourself then an SSD would work even better, but they're a lot more cash and given the age of your laptop probably throwing good money after bad.