To continue with Mex's question concerning a replacement hard drive. It's apparent from Crucial's web site he has several options for a larger hard drive. When he upgrades the RAM, that's basically plug and play, but how do you change the hard drive? I don't mean physically because that's like changing batteries.
My question is how does he transfer the programs and data from the old HD to the new one? And in this case as the Gateway has been around for a few years he most likely does not have the original program discs anymore. And let's assume at the time the Gateway was loaded with the programs (let's assume MS Word, Excel & Windows Home Premium 7) that he can't download them from the software people because that was a long time ago - how does he transfer the operating systems to the new HD? Let's also assume the Gateway has a couple of USB2 ports and a read/write CD player built in.
At one time I had looked at upgrading PCs and I thought I could just copy the above types of programs off of my old HD and load them onto the new one. I was told I couldn't do it, that MS had protection written into the programs so they can't be copied.
Last year while traveling, the HD on my ACER laptop started going bad. When I got home I took it to a local mom & pop computer shop. They charged me under $100 to put in a new 1TB HD and transfer the data over - BUT, I had to take them my original program discs. I couldn't find a couple of them, but I had recorded all of the info like authorization keys so they could be downloaded onto the new HD. It took a little bit of work, but everything works and the ACER is happy again.
So to reiterate, how would Mex transfer over the programs to a new HD? If you know how, please give as detailed of an answer as you can because he's said a few times that he's not very computer literate (and I want to know).
Thanks,
Bill
