Thread: Replacing Hard drive in laptop

Buy a SSD,, they are a straight swap for a laptop drive,, and mucho faster!!
while you have it open ,, see how many ram slots it has,, and how much it will take,, and spend up big!
little tiny spring clips on the sides of the ram,, easy once you see how

as to programs,, well yes I suppose.
Win 10 can be loaded and will run nearly indefinatly without paying for it,,,

I second an SSD. And extra ram will always be helpful - I would put 4GB at least in, and 2GB laptop sticks are pretty cheap. But if you have a 32bit CPU or operating system there's no point going more than 4GB.

Regarding software, check the laptop for any windows stickers. You can download and install the same version of windows using that key. Otherwise try and find a copy of win7. From what I hear its worth paying for over win 10!

Everyone is assuming the laptop is a windows machine. What if it's a Mac? Well, the answers are pretty much the same. Except, there is a great website called IfixIt that has great tutes for fixing and upgrading Macs.

Oh, and MacOs is free, and doesn't need a license key. It's been that way for years.

Its a windows machine, a Tobshiba Satelitte something or another.

My work laptop is very similar but think its the next model. Both have windows 7 and I certainly cant complain about it.

I am not a gamer or watch movie's and stuff like that , I use it to access the internet for Aulro and a few other site's and for google searches etc , so very basic stuff.

Thanks for the advice.

Cheers Ean

PS it does have the product code sticker still on the machine so if windows 7 can be down loaded then I may be ok

Download Win7 here

The sticker may say which version you have. If not just try them all until it lets you download the software. My guess is basic or home premium.

I wouldn't bother with the additional expense of an SSD on an old laptop.
Yes, they are faster, but they can only be as fast as the slowest device in the entire system!
That is, the SSD may transfer data at say 100Mb/s, but if the top speed of the SATA pipeline(on the motherboard in the laptop) is only 30Mb/s, then the speed of the SSD is just wasted.

SSDs are still good tho as they're not mechanical and hence not as susceptible to knocks and bumps whilst running.
So if there's a chance that you may fumble whilst using the lappie .. then SSD will make sense.

250 Gb SSD = about $100 + 1Tb(1000Gb) HDD can be had for about $85 or less. more = better quality, more durable(or larger again!)

At the moment, I see that the Seagate 1Tb firecuda SSHD is about the best value for money drive for an old latop. It'll probably outperform most old laptops drive line data throughputs(ie. it'll be faster than the laptops motherboard, has good capacity(1tb, but has an SSD section built into it too .. hence the SSHD in the name .. an SSD+HDD combo. that is the $85 option near the top end of the cheap range.
My personal preference for 2.5" HDDs has been Western Digital black drives. About $90 for a 1Tb model. Fast and reliable(I've had 3 different Seagates totally fail in about 3 years with not really a lot of usage). Other than the one that I got my son, which he banged massively hard in frustration once .. never had a WD drive fail on me. I have 4 in my current desktop from what seems like a million years ago now, all used heavily too.. and 4 Reds in my NAS also heavily used as a multimedia server.

Make sure that if you do the drive update, you go to the Toshiba website and download all the drivers and updated bits of software for your specific model.
Things like ethernet drivers, video drivers, wifi .. etc, etc.
Windows install will load generic drivers for your machine, but usually for optimal performance the Toshiba updates and drivers will work better. Not always, but usually!

Pop them into a USB thumbdrive or CD or whatever and have them ready to install .. and just use Windows driver update system's via Device Manager and use the search my computer option(not the search automatically option!) and point the search to the USB or CD location on the laptop.

The major problem in installing most Win7 install disc images is that they will probably be old non updated versions, so you'll end up installing a non up to date version of Win7, and then spend the next few days installing all the current updates.

What I do when reinstalling Windows is to first locate the latest window update files usually called a roll up file. That is it's a file you download to a computer, and combine it with a Windows installation iso file to make the Win install an already updated version.
Saves a few hours of Windows non update version updating itself, and even tho the 'rollup' update file is massive(sometimes 2Gb or so), it's usually smaller than all the updates combined individually(which could end up being 3Gb all up).

The process may sound daunting or convoluted, but there are many sites that show you clear and easy to follow instructions.

Here's one I found on How To Geeks.

Takes a bit of work, but saves a lot of work.

Also of note: if you see or read of a way that you can save yourself a DVD by creating a bootable USB thumbdrive of Windows(with the rollup updates integrated) and want to give something liek that a go(highly recommended) .. you have to be sure you know how to set your laptop to boot from a USB drive in the BIOS.
Not hard to do, but I've helped people trying this Windows install method(from a USB drive instead of DVD) and it turned out that the issue was that the BIOS wasn't set to boot from a USB drive at all .. so it sat there with no OS, and no CD/DVD and just a black screen!
Setting the laptop to boot from a USB drive is simple too!

if all that sounds a bit daunting, I already have Win 7 rollup updated ISOs archived and it'd take me about 30 mins to make an install USB thumbdrive.
If you mailed me a USB thumbdrive, I can load it for 'ya, verify that it boots up, works, send it back and you'd be good to go.

But have a peek at the how to websites, they give good links to files available (most likely the same files I've downloaded from M$ too) and learn a new trick or two yourself.

Funnily, I got my daughter a new faster/more powerful laptop for Xmas to replace her old slow very cheap lappie.
So I now have a cheap unwanted lappie myself that no one wants, but can't bear to get rid of it. Waste not want not! Been meaning to give it a clean install too.

Originally Posted by AK83

My personal preference for 2.5" HDDs has been Western Digital black drives. About $90 for a 1Tb model. Fast and reliable(I've had 3 different Seagates totally fail in about 3 years with not really a lot of usage). Other than the one that I got my son, which he banged massively hard in frustration once .. never had a WD drive fail on me. I have 4 in my current desktop from what seems like a million years ago now, all used heavily too.. and 4 Reds in my NAS also heavily used as a multimedia server.

A detailed post, with good advice, however I have not had the same luck as you with WD drives. I won't touch Seagate, but I don't think WD are much better. I like to find Hitachi HDDs when I can. Still, like I said, it's often luck.

Originally Posted by johntins

A detailed post, with good advice, however I have not had the same luck as you with WD drives. ...

Which WDs?(ie. what colour?)
Laptop or desktop?

Hitachi are a lot better now than they used to be a while back .. notoriously referred too as 'Deathstar'(actually named Deskstar) due to their common failure rate. But they upped their game and came good a while back.
My 10" Win7 tablet(Gigabyte) had a ultra slim Hitachi too. Only reason I changed it to an SSD was for better battery life.

So my comment that an SSD may not be the performance upgrade many seem to think wasn't meant to discourage. Just inform.
There are more reasons to get an SSD than just faster performance. Much lower power, usually 1/3rd that of a HDD, and easily more saved when used in hibernation mode too.
Put a HDD in hibernation mode and it takes the rest of the day to re power up .. so it's sometimes not a viable option for general usage. Whereas an SSD wakes up almost instantly.
Also their resistance to impacts is much more well known as a feature, as HDDs can easily fail when knocked whilst running. Not as common as it used to be, but the possibility is always there.

I still have some of my old 250Gb WDs from wayyyy back when they were the antz pants .. about 2000 or 2001.

The only WD drive I use lightly is my Green drive(my primary photo backup archive), but it'll have to go soon as it's at 1.8Tb out of 2tb.
Samsung stopped making HDDs to concentrate on SSDs only, and from reading many tech reports, they were about as reliable a consumer HDD as you could get.

I have two SSDs, one Kingston and one Samsung, 4x WDs and 2x Samsungs HDDs on this current box. SSDs are new, HDDs are all recycled from my last desktop circa 2008.

Only drives I've ever had trouble with have been Seagates, and that one WD that my son smacked hard with his fist(on the laptop right above where the drive sits).
He had to go without a laptop for nearly two weeks tho(mad all day gamer type kid) .. and he bled over it for those two weeks. In the end I got him a Samsung SSD too tho, as his lappie is modern and fast.