quick question about upgrading the hard drive in inspirons

first of all, how easy is it to do this?

and second of all, if i do this, then wouldnt the hard drive be blank? how would i get the operating system back on.

specifically, im planning to use a hard drive from a laptop made by a different company to replace it with the hard drive from the dell (my brother has hookups with broken laptops and stripped laptop parts). how would i go about getting winxp up on another hard drive? is it hard to do?

 

Replacing the HD is one of the easier upgrades on a notebook, and realistically one of the only upgrades you can do besides the RAM. One thing to note when upgrading is that you make sure you are buying a SATA HD and not a ATA HD or else the connections will not fit. Besides that it should be pretty easy. If you want to load XP on the new hard drive make sure you have a copy of XP. Dell should have sent you out an XP disc, if not then it's easy to get over the phone or by Dell chat. Since Dell deals with OEM discs it will only load up on Dell computers. By changing the HD it shouldn't throw it off too much like if you were to change the motherboard, but you will have to activate XP over the phone with Micro$oft. For your specific model of Inspirion this link should provide you with information on how to remove your specific HD, but it mostly has to do with unscrewing a face plate and disconnecting your HD.
http://support.dell.com/support/sys...aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~cat=12&~subcat=86

 

open it up, put it in, install o/s using cd
difficulty: low-medium, I recommend you look for a tutorial on how to do so

 

let's say i replaced the hard drive with the hard drive from an hp laptop (and it came with all the garbage that would come on an hp laptop). how would that make the situation different in terms of getting a clean install of windows, wiping off all of hp's garbage, etc?

 

well if you put in a harddrive with a pre-installed O/S on it, you have to format in any event, since to my experience it won't work that way..
once you have formatted it and installed windows again, check if there is any bloatware.. if there is, go to control panel -> add/remove programs and try to get as many as you can..
if that didn't do the job, you may consider reading a manual on this, it's an art work to itself (getting rid of all bloatware)..
but again, if you have a XP installation disc, without the bloatware on, then no problem.. just install XP and you are ready to go

 

how would i format it?

what exactly would i have to do after plugging the hard drive from the hp in?

 

You just have to place the OS disc into the drive and it should start you on a series of prompts, one of which will ask you to format the drive. By formating the drive you would wipe everything off the drive, or prepare it to load data. Again the XP disc comes with everything you will need minus certain drivers for parts with your Dell such as Media Direct. Try following the tutorial found here on the Dell forum.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=67545