On Wed, 6 Feb 2008 13:12:40 -0800 (PST),
"friesian@zoocrewphoto.com" <friesian@zoocrewphoto.com>
wrote:

>I am considering a new hard drive for my laptop.
>
>I have added extra hard drives to a desktop, but this is the first
>time I would be replacing the main hard drive. I have heard there is
>software to copy a hard drive, but I assume that you must need
>something to connect them while you do that.

Yes, Grinder mentioned how to do that with a pair of laptop
drive adapters. They're about $3 each online.

>
>The other option is to reinstall the software. How easy is it to
>install the operating service? I have an installation CD of windows XP
>that came with my desktop. Would I just put in the new hard drive, put
>the CD in the drive, and then boot the computer? Or is it pretty
>complicated?

Installing the OS is easy, the installer will guide you
through that, but you would need to find the drivers for all
of it. One reason to choose a fresh OS installation would
be if the present OS is really cluttered up with old
software remnants, infected by malware that you can't
remove, or the OEM made a lot of modifications to the
installation that you don't want and can't effectively get
rid of as fast as reinstalling (providing you have all the
drivers and software you need to reinstall).

I suppose it is somewhat complicated to do the clean
installation, not difficult per se but several steps if all
you have is a OS CD but not drivers and applications handy,
then presuming you'd let windows update itself with patches
over time, it'll have to do that all over again which IIRC,
was several hundred MB of downloads the last time I
reinstalled someone's XP w/SP2.


>
>
>Also, would it be a lot faster to upload photos from a camera's memory
>card to the internal hard drive as to an external hard drive? And
>would it be a lot fast to burn a CD from files on the internal drive
>as compared to an external drive?

The camera is probably slower than the drive so whether the
destination of the picture files is an internal or external
drive wouldn't matter.

Burning a CD might go a bit faster from an internal drive.



>
>I have an older laptop (Pentium 3, 800 GHz, maxed at 1GB ram). I
>cannot afford to get a new laptop. I have been using an external hard
>drive since the laptop is only 30GB. I have found a 160 GB hard drive
>for $65, and I am hoping that this would speed up my computer work. I
>have to upload files from the camera, edit them and save them, then
>burn them to a CD. I usually do about 10GB worth in a weekend. And my
>laptop currently doesn't have that much space to work with.
>
>Would this improve my work flow, making file transfers a lot faster?

Since your laptop is so old I wonder how you are getting the
files onto it? Presumably a USB1.1 data link?

If you use a flash card reader make sure it is USB2. Get a
USB2 (cardbus, assuming there is a free slot for it) card
for the laptop. Moving from USB1.1 to USB2 should greatly
speed up the transfers into the laptop.

Further, assuming still that your system has USB1.1 not
USB2, all external drives connecting over USB would use the
much slower USB1.1 data rate, unless it has firewire. This
is another case where installing a cardbus USB2 card would
speed up external drives, but the internal drive will still
be the faster in use.

By only installing the new hard drive you will have no
increase in transfer speed to the drive from the camera's
flash card, but editing and saving will be a bit faster.