Upgrade Hard drive in Dell Laptop

jon2432

I have a Dell Inspiron 1525. The 80gb hard drive is getting full. How easy is it to swap hard drives over?

I've googled swapping over etc and got slightly confused about cloning the drives etc.

Is there any free software that will do this and what else would i need to buy, caddy etc to complete the task.

Any help greatfully appreciated.

closed

most hd manufacturers have a tool to clone them.

what's it full of?

jon2432

Usual windows bloat. Cleaned/ backed up most of it bit its still down to 10Gb

closed

windows shouldn't be anywhere near 70GB

jon2432

Throw in office 2010 and all the other stuff accumulated over a few years. Just after some idea of what i need to swap drives over. Do i need a caddy etc to transfer the data from old to new

Hammyman

Yes you do. The hard drive is a SATA one. When you've bought a new drive, go to the manufacturers website and you should find some software to clone it. Do it in the following order:

1) Download and install cloning software
2) Place NEW HARD DRIVE in the caddy
3) Run cloning software selecting the laptop drive as the source and the USB one as destination
4) Once its finished, shut down the computer, swap over the drives and you are good to go.

Changing the hard drive is easy. A couple of screws hold a cover on. Take that off and the drive is there in a caddy. Take it out, remove the caddy, fit to the new drive and put it all back together.

closed

windirstat might help you find the bloat.

you could write the image to dvd's instead, but presumably a caddy would be useful for the old hard disk

jon2432

Thanks for the replies. Any deas what the cables are called for connecting to the laptop from the new hard drive.

I've looked on ebay but can't suss it out.

TakeThis

2.5 SATA to USB HARD DRIVE CADDY £2.99

2.5 SATA to USB HARD DRIVE CADDY £2.75

2.5 SATA to USB HARD DRIVE CADDY £2.69

closed

it could be pata

jon2432

Thanks for all your swift replies guys.

Regards