Lenovo Thinkpad Edge E520 hard drive switch

If you have read my previous forum post, you may know that my older laptop died on me. Since the price to fix it was very expensive, I decided to buy a new laptop. After about 2 weeks of almost an hour of research a day, I decided to buy the Thinkpad Edge E520 with the intel core i5 from Amazon (I also bought an additional 4gb ram right away). I haven't even received it from the mail yet but I already have a question. Before my laptop died, I installed Kontakt 4 onto it, which is a large 48GB program that took an hour to install. Not only that, but all of my settings and files are on the old hard drive along with Windows 7 professional that I upgraded from Vista. Instead of taking a lot of time to re-install all of my programs and transferring all of my files, would it be easier to just put my old hard drive into the new Thinkpad and just install all of the new drivers? As in would the time it takes to re-install the drivers be less time than installing my programs back, ruffly 60GB of programs, and transferring my files, ruffly 5GB of music, word documents ect? It is a 320GB 7,200 RPM Sata hard drive. In this instance, I would put the 500GB hard drive that the Thinkpad comes with into a hard drive enclosure and use it as an external hard drive. Thanks for any help!

 

Probably the only way to find out is to do it.

 

yes it should work just fine

but

what I would highly recommend is after first boot let windows run for about 10 to 20 minutes, open a couple basic programs, like gallery/picture viewer, notepad

then reboot at least once, I say twice

first time you move a harddrive like that the BIOS and Windows will burp a bit
and you want your new OS and harddrive to match up with the BIOS nicely
and cache in the ram well

THEN install drivers, proggys, move files etc.

also, slap your harddrive and ram if that's case in the E520 BEFORE ever turning it on
fresh from the box

I like to do all I can to avoid even the smallest bug on an install.........