don't lie, its all porn.

 

Why not just get like a 250GB USB external drive to copy everything over to so you can do the reinstall. Sounds like you could use the extra storage space as it is. h:

 

open the laptop and put the new drive in

 

QFT.

I'd just get an external 3.5" (unless you are really crammed for space) and just move data to that and leave the one inside the laptop alone.

That way you can get a huge external drive and save all kinds of things and not have to worry about the internal and reinstalling XP and all that happy horse shit with activation and reinstalling drivers and software what a pain in the ass.

The next best thing would be something like GHOST software for making an image of the drive that you can then restore to another drive and it's almost just that easy. Have to resize the partition or make another one and hope windows makes it through.

 

The reason I have this laptop is that it's small, light, self contained, and goes several hours on battery.

Doing this one-time swap thing and having a 60 GB external drive to do whatever with, is way more convenient to me than still having the 60 GB in the computer and needing to be tethered to an external drive and a power source for the drive whenever I want to get at those files.

I could go for a 160 GB drive but it's only 5400 RPM, or a 100 GB drive that spins at 7200 RPM. This is only a Centrino Pentium M 1.7 GHz with 512 MB of ram and some ATI 32 MB video card that's separate from the mobo, so it's no speed demon, but the 7200 RPM and maybe some more ram might speed things up a bit.

 

7200rpm kills battery life

 

Good to know.

I just looked up some specs, apparently the drive in there right now is 4200 RPM so I should probably stick to 5400 RPM tops.

Also, I know it's not SATA, but is there any possibility an Ultra ATA 150 drive would not work if the current drive is an Ultra ATA 100? As in, is Ultra ATA 150 something the mobo needs to support?

 

Ultra ATA 150 is usually serial, but yeah... it should work. i have a ata133 drive in my desktop which only supports ata100 and it works

 

Oh wait, yeah, I got that screwed up.

Is there any difference between, "IDE Ultra ATA100" and "ATA-6"?

There's two different sections for those on Newegg, but this chart on Wikipedia seems to indicate they're the same thing.

 

ATA 6 = Ultra ATA/100