Upgrading to 500gb 7200rpm in dell Studio 1555

So I'm running out of room on my Dell Studio's stock 320GB 5400rpm HD (down to 20gbs or so) and even though I've pushed a lot of stuff to my portable external harddrive, I would rather just have the extra room on my laptop instead of carrying around the external HD, So Yester day I went out and bought a hard drive enclosure and a this Seagate - Momentus 500GB Internal Serial ATA Hard Drive for Laptops - ST905003N3A1AS-RK from best yesterday, a 500gb 7200rpm HD. I am think about starting the install sometime this weekend however I dunno the best way to do it as I have never swapped out an HD before.

My External HD came with a SATA cord and my laptop has input for it, so question 1. is Sata faster and should I use that interface to transfer over the data from my existing HD
And question 2. Is cloning my HD where it is bootable and such as easy as copy the whole drive and putting it on my new one ? Or do I need software to do this? and if so what software and how expensive is it...

Thanks in advance for your help.

PS.. Can anyone tell me their experiences with 7200rpm drives on the studio 1555? like is the performance gain worth the brattery drain?

 

I've upgraded a friend's Studio 1555 to a Hitachi 7K500, runs really fast and not warm at all, or any other form of vibration. You could also probably get an SSD if you have the cost. Battery wise, there is not much to notice about. The power consumption is typically higher on 7200rpm drives, but the total battery life doesn't really get affected noticeably.

I've also had an iMac Socket P E8335 (aka T9800) CPU upgraded and working in a 1555.

 

Good to hear, i didn't think It would affect battery life too much... and I would love an SSD ha but I need alot of storage and paying almost 1000 bucks for a lardge is out of the budget ha

 

my battery life changed by 45-60 minutes. If you don't NEED the speed, stick with a 5400

 

I have a second battery and I generally stay fairly close to a charger any way so Im not crazy worried about it..

So Um, If I just want to do a clean install but only have the Dell Upgrade disc they sent me for Windows 7 will it not work? When I installed Windows 7 overtop of Vista, I did a clean install however since this drive is completely empty will the install fail out or not work?


******EDIT******

Actually Never mind Dell said they would send me a full install disc for Windows 7, which is nice because I'd actually rather just do a clean install even though It sucks to re-install all my stuff

 

I have had great results by just using a program like Acronis (western digital uses the same) to clone the disk. Leave the old drive installed, boot from the Acronis boot disk, select to clone the old drive to the new drive and then put the new drive in when it is done. Takes around 30 minutes and everything is just like it was. I would leave the original drive as is for awhile just to make sure the new dirve is ok.

Unless you just want to do a clean install to clean up the system, this is a quick and easy solution.