Laptop drives/ram/possibly OS upgrade advice needed please

It is probably too late now, but you should have never posted those images. I will contact one of the Admins to see if they can remove those images. They should be gone by the time you check back, if not edit your post and delete them by removeing them through "Manage Attachments".

What I meant by "poor data transfer rates" is the better the cabling, the better the speed of transferring data. if you are okay with USB2 then use it or an eSATA cable that will fit the port on the right side of your laptop.
See the comparison chart here: Computer Cable Transfer Speeds | Statistic Brain

Your mention of the HDClone response;
They are probably assuming you are going to use an external connection like your eSATA/USB combo port. That should work, but I'm not sure, all I can say is "try it".
If not you may have to clone to a DVD, replace the drives then copy the DVD to the hybrid, but then you will lose your laptop for part of a day.

Is it really that bad to be "out of circulation for part of a day"?



As for the rest of your post, I am forbidden by the Forum rules to comment on any of it except for,

I had forgotten that it is specific for Dell, if that matters. The desktop is an Acer.

Yes it would matter. You can not legally use a Dell OEM with an Acer. I would go back and get a refund from the vendor.

What I would do is make a bootable clone or image of your present HDD, exchange the drives then boot your clone to the new drive.


See 4.1.1 Bootable Medium page 24: HDClone_4.3_ Users Manual.pdf

Hi,

Thanks alot to Anak and Greg for taking out time and providing so much insightful information on my request.

I believe it helped b52 in answering alot of queries. I believe best would be to take a backup of complete windows image on a external harddrive ( as you stated you already done that yesterday).

So install the new harddrive and load the image on the new drive and that should work. I believe its time you should start with the process and let us know if you face any difficulties as we all are here to assist you and achieve the desired.

Hope this information helped. If you have any further queries, please feel free to contact us.

I’ve just cloned the laptop drive to a 500GB external usb drive, it took less than 2 hours using HD Clone via usb2 – first occasion I’ve had enough uninterrupted time to do this. No hardship there as the only things I did on the laptop in the interim were minor email updates and assorted web searches – no problem if I lose them somewhere in the process.

One odd thing is that the clone is a few gigs smaller than the original, I did a 1:1 so don’t quite understand why?

So now I’m going to say something which is probably stupid, in the sense of being ignorant (as in not having sufficient knowledge, sorry to be pedantic but sometimes people misunderstand the true meaning of words).

I’m still not sure why it was necessary to clone the laptop drive, except as a precaution maybe – that’s understandable.

What’s wrong with just removing the laptop drive as is, replacing it with the brand new shiny (and empty) hybrid drive, then installing the new Win 7 OS on that and finally loading the clone or original drive content back on to it?(Having swapped the RAM cards in the process of reassembly.)

Just tell me if I’m missing something vital, I can’t see why it should be any more complicated than this.Patience appreciated as well as simple explanations please.

I’m a bit more than hesitant to do a clean Reinstall – I asked if it was strictly necessary and got no answer if I recall.

Aside from everything else it appears to refer to my licensed version? The product key for the laptop’s native version will obviously be different to that of the new version that I want to install – either before (which seems to make sense provided I also install the network settings/properties, AVG and Malwarebytes Pro before proceeding further?) or after restoring the cloned drive content.

Activation would be done using the new version’s product key as explained on MS’ site (this link isn’t what I was looking at but it makes the point): http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-vista/activating-windows-frequently-asked-questions

So what’s the problem?

Sorry to hear that you “don't have time to re-read the thread right now as I have 25 threads waiting for reply” – sometimes it pays to deal with just two or three requests at a time properly than to meander around a large number not knowing the status of each? No offence intended.

b52 said:

I’ve just cloned the laptop drive to a 500GB external usb drive, it took less than 2 hours using HD Clone via usb2 – first occasion I’ve had enough uninterrupted time to do this. No hardship there as the only things I did on the laptop in the interim were minor email updates and assorted web searches – no problem if I lose them somewhere in the process.

One odd thing is that the clone is a few gigs smaller than the original, I did a 1:1 so don’t quite understand why?

So now I’m going to say something which is probably stupid, in the sense of being ignorant (as in not having sufficient knowledge, sorry to be pedantic but sometimes people misunderstand the true meaning of words).

I’m still not sure why it was necessary to clone the laptop drive, except as a precaution maybe – that’s understandable.

What’s wrong with just removing the laptop drive as is, replacing it with the brand new shiny (and empty) hybrid drive, then installing the new Win 7 OS on that and finally loading the clone or original drive content back on to it?(Having swapped the RAM cards in the process of reassembly.)

Just tell me if I’m missing something vital, I can’t see why it should be any more complicated than this.Patience appreciated as well as simple explanations please.

Hi b52,

Clone images are normally lesser than the actual size of data on the harddrive as these clone images are in compressed format to enable to store on a drive with lesser space as well.

Yes it is better to have a complete cloned image as a backup so if you face any problems transferring data to the new harddrive you still have the complete data intact on a external harddrive.

If you install windows on the new harddrive and then transfer the data you would be able to move all the files and folder but you would need to install all the softwares again on the system.

However, clone image is backup of operating system, all installed software,updates,system settings and your file and folders. So if you load the clone image directly you would not need to spend any time installing any softwares or updates on the system.

If you need to have a different OS on the system then clean install the new OS on the new drive and then transfer all the folders and files manually and install all the required software which would be time consuming.

I hope this answers some of your queries. If you have any further queries feel free to reach out to us.

Hi Sandeep

Looks like I have a lot of work whatever I choose to do! I think the clone was slightly smaller because I opted out of Dell’s ‘Media Direct’ when cloning – apparently it can cause problems with the kind of changes I want.

Couple of queries (your info is in black, mine in blue to be as clear as possible):

“If you install windows on the new hard drive and then transfer the data you would be able to move all the files and folder but you would need to install all the software again on the system.”

Not quite sure what you mean by this (assuming by Windows you mean the new OS version), especially in view of your further comments below? However, I could do that, but it would be a lot of work which I'd obviously like to avoid if possible.

“However, clone image is backup of operating system, all installed software, updates, system settings and your file and folders. So if you load the clone image directly you would not need to spend any time installing any software or updates on the system.

If you need to have a different OS on the system then clean install the new OS on the new drive and then transfer all the folders and files manually and install all the required software which would be time consuming.”

In spite of having been bought on Ebay, the new OS cost a significant enough amount (£38.00) and I really would like to take advantage of its additional features in any case.

But it seems from what you say that I will still have to reinstall all of my software (is that what you meant by ‘install all the required software’?) and have to transfer all folders and files manually – I find this very difficult to credit, especially given gregrocker’s having said that there are only minor differences between the versions of Windows 7!

If it were Windows 8 I was trying to install I could believe it, but I wouldn’t consider Win 8 for either a laptop or a desktop. Also, as far as I know this doesn’t happen if you do an official upgrade via Microsoft’s Windows Anytime Upgrade so why would this kind of change be that much different?

Can I therefore ask for some clarification on this please?

Lastly, the clean install instructions mention entering the product key, but as my previous post says ‘The product key for the laptop’s native version will obviously be different to that of the new version that I want to install’ – what do I do in this case?

I freely admit to being totally confused now about the whole process…