Upgrading your hard drive is something that takes a little thought and preparation, if you have had your computer a while and built up an army of music, movies and personal stuff then you may be related to upgrade your hard drive in fear of losing all your data. This being said you can rest assured that you can easily copy all of your details across quickly and easily, keep in mind though you will need to keep following the points in mind.

• Do you have an operating system disc to re-install your operating system?
• Do you have all your hardware drivers, or can you get them?
• Have you made a complete backup of all your personal files in case something goes wrong?

If you can answer yes to the above then you can easily upgrade or replace your hard drive yourself saving you time and money.

There are 3 main reasons you may want to change your hard drive: –

• Not enough room on your current drive
• Your current drive has become noisy when running
• You have multiple errors on the drive causing it to run slow.

Another reason is the speed of your drive, many people are now upgrading from a 5400RPM drive to a faster 7200RPM drive simply to speed up the read / write time of the drive.

The steps involved in changing over your hard drive are quite straight forward.

1. Ensure you have all your documents and everything you wish to keep on disc of other type of media that is separate to the PC, flash drive, external hard drive etc are perfect for this.
2. Next turn off the power and remove the power lead.
3. Remove the case of the base unit and locate the hard drive.
4. Remove the Data Cable and power supply from the rear of the drive
5. Remove the securing screws and extract the hard drive from the case.
6. Install the new hard drive in the reverse order of the above.

Once you have your computer put back together you will need to start up your computer making sure you have your operating disc to hand, start up your computer and enter your BIOS and ensure your computer is set to boot from the CD Rom drive as the first device.

Insert your Operating disc in to the drive and exit the bios so your computer starts to boot.

Follow the onscreen instructions to install your operating system, once this has completed take the time to install any service packs and security updates available for your computer. Once you have completed this you can start installing your device drivers and lastly all your personal files.

Note even if you are unsure if you have an operating system, or how to boot from the CD drive then consult a professional to do the job for you! If you are familiar with installing operating systems and so on then you can easily tackle this upgrade.