Upgrading the Disk on my Pavilion dv2000t

I upgraded to Vista and now have noticed that my 60GB hard drive doesn't have as much free disk space as I anticipate needing in the next few months. I'm thinking of installing a bigger hard drive and have two questions:

1. Any recommendations on the size/type and sourcing of a hard drive upgrade for this model?

2. What's the easiest and quickest procedure to get everything off my current drive and onto the new drive? My goal is obviously to end up with the same sotware image I have now -- just sitting on the newer, larger drive.

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

120-160 gigs maybe?

Image the drive using an imaging tool like acronis or norton ghost.

 

For notebook hard drives, I would recommend NewEgg ( www.newegg.com). Their prices are very good, and their customer service usually is as well. Finding 2.5" SATA notebook drives in stores isn't easy, and the prices are usually outrageous. (When you're looking don't forget the dv2000 series uses SATA drives, not the still more common ide drives.)

As for size, how much do you want to spend? 100 GB with Vista is a good minimum to leave you plenty of room free. Of course, more is always better. Also, I wouldn't recommend a drive slower than 5400 RPM. And, if 100 GB is enough, you can get 7200 RPM drives, though at a considerably higher cost. They also tend to produce somewhat more noise and heat than the slower drives, but many people think it's worth it for the extra speed.

 

R: I upgraded to Vista and now have noticed that my 60GB hard drive doesn't have as much free disk space.

On a "upgrade" there might be some temp files left behind.

Just a thought.


Another option you may want to consider (if you don't have one already) is something EVERY PC user.. and LAPTOP user for SURE should have is a EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE.

Useful to make a image of your hd, so you can restore the OS in minutes if needed.
Useful to make regular backups of OS, and more importantly your DATA...

Never know when a virus or something will hit, and with Windows it's not a matter of "if" the OS won't boot one day, but "when".... and in thos cases it's always "nice" to have a copy of your data... on another source.

Another thing that laptop users never think of is THEFT of the unit.... If your unit was stolen today.... Could you do without your DATA?

One more thing- People are fools to put their data on the same partition that the OS resides on... Like I said it's not a matter of "if", but when you will not be able to boot the OS, and in most cases you're going to need to do a re-install of the OS to get it back up again and there is a good chance in the process that data might be lost.

PS: You can put money on that happening with a "new" Os just come to market as well, compared to a OS that has matured.