Installing new hard drive - thoughts?

[dukemagic]

I'm about to back up everything I want to keep onto an external hard drive (which I already have / have been doing) and taking out my current hard drive (3 years old, 160 gigs) that I've never had to reformat since I got it, and replacing it with a larger hard drive (160 gigs, 16mb buffer rather than 8mb).

The hard drive is only 60 bucks off of newegg, and my computer has been steadily getting a little slower, I think from age and from all the random stuff I have on there (I've never had to wipe my hard drive clean, so this is 3 years worth of random crap building up). It's taking a LOT longer to start up than it should, and for the amount of RAM and such I have, it's slower than I think it should be (Dell Dimension 8400, I upgraded the RAM to 2 gigs, 3 ghz processor, upgraded the video card a while back to ATI All-in-Wonder x600 - yes I know this isn't anything amazing, but it should still be decently fast, no?). I've done a lot of virus and spyware checking, so I think I'm as clean as I can reasonably get it, without doing a lot of stuff that's way beyond me. Does anyone have any thoughts?

Here are mine:

a) computer will be cleaner and faster
b) will still have old hard drive in case i mess up something
c) replacing hard drives is easy, right? just take out the old one, put the new one in, make sure the computer recognizes it, and then install windows and start over new

I'm a little worried about reinstalling the programs that require a password (Pokertracker, PAHUD, iTunes songs, etc) and carrying over all of my emails (I have thousands of emails I want to keep) and hand histories and stuff. Has anyone does this recently and have any thoughts to share? Thanks.

[dukemagic]

oh oops, larger hard drive is 250 gigs, not 160. not that it really matters all that much to this discussion.

[gila]

[ QUOTE ]
I'm a little worried about reinstalling the programs that require a password (Pokertracker, PAHUD, iTunes songs, etc) and carrying over all of my emails (I have thousands of emails I want to keep) and hand histories and stuff. Has anyone does this recently and have any thoughts to share? Thanks.

[/ QUOTE ]

http://lifehacker.com/software/how-t...-pc-289265.php

A link to "backward" download your music FROM your ipod too computer. I have not tried it, but probably will since my hard drive with all my music is fried.

Also, as far as pokertracker and pahud, if your talking about the licence (sp) number, that is no big deal. I just did them both. For PT, you just email them and they will send you a new number; for PAhud, there is a link on their website where you put in your email addy and they will send you your number (or maybe you can get it off your current one). As for email, don't know, I have gmail and yahoo which are not computer based. I don't know how many emails you are talking about, but maybe you could just open a gmail account, and start sending them to that, then you have them.

As for PT HHs, I don't think it is too difficult to back them up on another HD and then reinstall them when you get your "new" PT running. I did this a year or so ago when I did a reinstall and it was not too bad. Not sure of the details though. I am sure you can find them either on the PT software or the pt forum.

Edit: Now if you could just tell me how to recover my info off my hard drive, that would be great. If not, I guess the Gov. is going to get a "best guess" for the first half of this year, cause I backed up nothing!

[dukemagic]

thanks for the response, gila.

as far as recovering info off your hard drive, i know nothing about that. however, there are places where you can take it in and sometimes they can perform magic. not sure how much that costs, though.

[Computerb]

I recently added a 250 GB HD to my system. My original drive is a 120 GB. Easiest thing to do is just add the new drive as a secondary drive and partition/format it from within Windows. You can then just use the new drive for your data/music/videos. Unless you have some reason to suspect your original drive is biting the dust, just keep using it until it dies.