Planning to upgrade my hard drive

[topcat5665]

Hello, I purchased a PC from PC specialist in January, and I am more than pleased with it. The only thing is that I bought a 500GB sata III hard drive and I am already down to 80GB. I will be buying a new hard drive soon (probably Caviar Black 1TB) and was wondering if I should
a) Use the current hard drive as a slave, and install fresh windows on the new HDD
b) Clean my current drive, use it as a slave and use the backup to put on my new HDD

Any suggestions would be a great help.

Thanks

 

[Rakk]

It would be best to do a clean install of Win7 on your new drive, and then reinstall everything you need on it.

Of course we all know that the best option is not always the one that you have time for, so it depends if you have the time and patience to do that, but yes, a clean install would be best.

 

[vanthus]

It's really quite easy to transfer your full system to your new hard drive using system image backup with windows7 own program in "backup and restore",using either a second internal or an external hard drive to store the backup,I've done it twice on two new hard drives with no problems.

 

[topcat5665]

It would be best to do a clean install of Win7 on your new drive, and then reinstall everything you need on it.

Of course we all know that the best option is not always the one that you have time for, so it depends if you have the time and patience to do that, but yes, a clean install would be best.

Thank you, I will do that.

 

[CEUOTC]

If you don't already know, here is a cheeky guide to doing a clean install via a USB.

1. Download this legal iso of windows 7 http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-from-digital-river/. Select your flavour 64 or 32 bit.
2. Use Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool to create a bootable USB stick (8GB to 16GB required).
3. Boot from the USB stick and start installing windows 7 (Use a USB 2.0 port).
4. Once installed use key that came with the desktop.
5. Sit back, have some tea and biscuits.

Regards.

C.