Thinking of brand new hard drive, new install of Vista. Recommended?

I've been in the market for a new laptop recently, but unfortunately due to one laptop arriving DOA, and nothing else in the price range that comes close in terms of specifications, so I've decided that perhaps my money would be better spent on just updating the one I currently own.

The laptop in question is two years old now so the warranty is long gone, and my 100gb/4200rpm hard drive is proving to be the weakest link in my system, so I was planning on picking up a 160gb/5400rpm Western Digital Drive and picking up a copy of Vista to put on my laptop. Is there anything I should know beforehand before going ahead with my master plan?

 

Just know whether your old hard drive is SATA or PATA and make sure your new drive is compatible. There shouldn't be a reason for the upgrade not to work after that.

I'm an XP zealot so I'm gonna tell you not to bother with the copy of Vista and spend that money somewhere else, especially if XP already does everything you need (of course, if there's some specific Vista feature that you really want, there's justification in getting a copy) and spend that money elsewhere (maybe for a 7200RPM drive instead? Save it towards a new laptop in the future?)

In any event, the Pentium M and 2GB of memory should give you sufficient Vista performance; it just won't be blazing.

 

I've got a PATA hdd at the moment so I'm looking at pata drives. The Western Digital 5400rpm 160gb seems to offer the best value for money.

As for vista, thinking about it you might be right. I do have a disc for XP around here which is 100% legitimate. However I did use it on a PC some years ago, I'm not sure if I'll be able to install it onto a new laptop, and I'm not sure if I've got the original key for it.

And I don't know how I'd go about backing up my recovery partition on this Acer to use on a new laptop (and I don't even know if that would work)

 

Yeah, 160GB is probably the sweet spot for PATA drives.

I'm assuming you have a retail copy of XP that you installed on that desktop. You should be able to install that copy of XP onto the Acer using the provided key on the bottom of your laptop (assuming that your laptop originally shipped with XP and the variants are the same). Your laptop should have a different key than the retail XP, so you've got two keys and two computers and you're total legit.

I don't know how you can transfer the Acer recovery partition without making a copy of your entire disk image. Acer might have some software to make you a new recovery partition on your new drive on their website?

 

Yeah, I've got a retail disc of XP that I bought many years ago. I installed it on my desktop, i think I still have the original key. But I do have the key for my laptop, would it be legit to use one of those keys with the retail disc? With Windows Genuine Validation Tool they use now I don't want to be caught out and be unable to download any updates, service packs etc.

I think I'll avoid using any Acer backup stuff, thinking about it I'd have to sit around whilst all the acer crap ware gets installed onto the system, only for me to uninstall it several minutes (or hours) later.

 

It is totally legit to use the laptop key with the retail XP disk. Microsoft only cares about the licenses (attached to the keys), not the disks themselves. As long as you aren't using any license twice or an OEM license on a non-OEM machine, you should be fine.

And good choice with the Acer backup stuff XD

 

Well, think I'll give it a whirl then. Either way, it'll add a few £££ to the value of my laptop, and it will give me something to do tomorrow!

Thanks for your help

 

I second getting a 160Gb 5400 rpm drive.

The fastest ata drives, are the Hitachi 7K100 series, and the WD 250Gb 5400rpm drives.
The 160Gb 5400 will perform similar to a 80Gb 7200rpm drive.
The 160gb should give you a good speed boost, which you will love.

K-TRON

 

Well, the order has been placed I got myself the Western Digital Scorpio 160gb 5400rpm drive. I hope that the marketing fluff about "Whisper Quiet" is right, I hate noisy hard drives. I'm hoping it provides a decent performance boost over my current Seagate 4200rpm drive, its always been the weakest link in my laptop. Loading up the 'bigger' programs (Photoshop) can take quite some time and Windows can hang for quite a bit on the desktop whilst start-up is taking place.

I also picked up a Lite-On 8x DVDRW drive as mine kicked the bucket long ago, and a 2.5" External Enclosure (something to put my current 100gb hdd in, handy to have as a portable drive, and a bargain at £3.76!)

Hopefully I'll post back here tomorrow letting you all know how smooth and easy the transition was (although that never seems to happen.... :s)

Who knows, if all goes well perhaps I might look into a processor upgrade as well... ! Wonder what is on ebay that will go into a i915pm motherboard...

 

as long as you stay away from Vista you'll be fine...
my poor little Acer came w/ Vista which stayed on just long enough to find all the drivers my laptop needed for XP pro...

Vista was eating up 30 to 40% of system resources at idle... IE would bring it to a crawl,, unless you need some feature of Vista that XP can't provide, i'd stay away from Vista......... DirectX10 would be nice,, but i don't run anything that DX9 can't handle.

just my 3 cents or what ever it's worth,
bigozone

 

But Vista looks all pretty and shiny!

I wasn't that big a fan of Vista either, although I recently built a PC for a friend which we installed Vista on (his choice), and after spending a few days with the PC and switching off a load of Vista's annoying features (UAC sez hai) it seems to be running a-ok. Perhaps later in the year I'll look at a new laptop that has Vista pre-installed, but unless I win the lottery next week I won't be going Vista anytime soon.

 

Hooray! After a few troubles earlier on everything is running fine now, just in the middle of downloading a million different windows updates. So far this morning I've downloaded SP2, 51 high-priority updates and now there are another 55 waiting for me... I download one update and ten more just appear!

Also I'd like to say that this Western Digital Scorpio drive is both quiet and cool. I thought going from a 4200rpm to 5400rpm drive would inevitably produce more noise but its sat there a quiet as a mouse. I have to put my ear to my palm rest to hear anything. Its been downloading/installing for the past few hours and its just sat at around 37c. Brilliant stuff. I'll run a PCMark HDD test later to see how much more performance this drive is giving me.

Thanks for everyones help, I'm very happy with mah noo supercharged laptop.