Hardrive swap

im planning to get a new faster hard drive soon and i dont want to re install all of my stuff. is there a way i can transfer the stuff on my current hard drive and transfer it somehow? i was thinking maybe i could buy an external hard drive and transfer all of my data. then swap hard drives, then import the data from the external HD to the new HD in my laptop. can that be done??

oh and i can get a 100 GB toshiba HD 5400 rpm for $200 CAN, is that a good price?? and also, is upgrading to a faster HD a good upgrade? i mean, i know it really speeds up the load times and what not, anyone else who has done the switch could you tell me how it went?

EDIT - just did a search and found that thread where hard drives were discussed, answered most of my questions. dont bash on me for asking again!! haha

 

I would recommend backing up all your files, then doing a clean install of XP on the new drive. Burn them to a CD, should have space.

 

burn what to a cd?

 

He means burn the important files to a CD, but you'd still need to reinstall all your individual programs in addition to reinstalling WinXP. If your system is configured the way you like it and there's no stability issues, there is absolutely no reason to do that.

Simply connect both drives together on the IDE chain(may require disconnecting your optical drive(Cd-Rom, DVD, etc..) on some chipsets that don't have dual IDE channels. Then use an application like Ghost to transfer the entire partition of data from the old drive to the new. Pull your old drive out, make sure the new one is configured as the master, re-connect your optical, and you're done.

 

You could also use Acronis True Image 9.0 instead of Ghost, just another way of "ghosting" your drive. There's a free demo available on their website.

Matt