Has your hard drive become too small?

If so Lifehacker as a great step by step on how to image your current hard drive and install a new one and move all of your data and programs back just the way it was on your old hard drive. 

This is a very easy exercise and is a good start for someone who wants to start to get involved in upgrading there computer. At Technitive we have found that Windows 7 runs great on older hardware that maybe vista would have been slow on. With a couple of cheap tweaks like installing more RAM and a maybe a new hard drive you should be good to go installing windows 7 on a computer from 2 or 3 years ago.

Excerpt from the Lifehacker article:

 









For the purpose of this article, we're going to start after the point at which you've physically installed the hard drive—there's just a couple of screws and a cable, after all, but if you still need some help you can check out our guide to installing a hard drive for a primer on the basic technique.

Below, we'll highlight a few tools that can help you clone your old hard drive to a new one (and choose a favorite we'll use), detail a few of the finer points for getting started on a laptop or desktop computer, then guide you through the cloning and upgrading process.

Options for Cloning Your Drive
To upgrade your hard drive without reinstalling everything, you'll need to use a utility to make an exact copy, or clone, from the old hard drive to the new one. A number of commercial tools will do this for you, and even some free Windows utilities can make a copy of your drive while your PC is running. For example, see our guide to using DriveImageXML to hot image your PC's hard drive, which is an excellent tool for making a backup. The problem, however, is that it doesn't create a true clone of the drive, since you'd still have to reinstall the Windows bootloader using a repair CD if you wanted to boot into your cloned drive.

The bigger problem, particularly if you're upgrading a laptop, is that you need to have a copy of Windows already running for most of the free utilities to work; most laptops can only have one drive hooked up at a time. In this case, your best free option is the Linux-based Clonezilla Live CD, which streamlines the process of imaging your drive to an external drive or even a shared folder on another PC.


Have a look at the rest of this great step by step over at Lifehacker.