Brand new laptop but want to upgrade hard drive, what happends to software?

I am looking to purchase the Toshiba M645-S4055 and at the same time purchase the Western Digital WD Scorpio Black WD5000BEKT hard drive.

I have never done this before, so I would bring it in to a shop. I am wondering though. What happends after the hard drive is replaced. What happends to the Windows 7 Operation system that was pre-installed on the laptop and all the other softwares and Toshiba Softwares that was pre-loaded to the laptop? What happends to all of that?

 

The original software load stays with the old drive unless YOU take steps to transfer it.

There are plenty of drive imaging tools out there, some free, some payware.

A shop will probably charge you a few $$ to reimage the new drive with the old one. If you are unsure of what to do this is likely the best course of action to take.

Remember that any of your software licenses stay with you, it's probably illegal for you to resell your old drive with activated software on it.

 

Legal or not, it's a terrible idea to re-sell an old drive with any data on it all. Who knows what you forgot you stored on there, or what might be saved in the system cache, that some unscrupulous individual might take advantage of.

 

There's a first time for everything. Changing the hard drive on a computer is pretty trivial. All you would have to do is take off a back cover, which usually takes 2 or so screws, swap the hard drives, then screw the back cover back on.

Like newsposter said, if you want to keep the exact way your hard drive was before, you would have to re image your hard drive, but that may be a little complicated since you would need somewhere to store that image, etc. The easiest way is to just backup any important files (documents, music, videos, etc.) on a flash drive or something similar, then format and re install windows and all the software you want on it. This will also get rid of all that junkware you pc might have same with and make your computer run faster. Windows should take care of all the drivers automatically so you don't have to worry about that.

If you don't feel comfortable doing this though, just take it to a shop and tell them to transfer the stuff for you.

 

I had the WD5000BEKT in my laptop. I wasn't very impressed with it. If you have the money I'd recommend getting the Momentus XT. It will often feel like an SSD.

 

Would you say the Momentus XT is the best budget upgrade for a HDD as of today?

 

Yes. If you can't or don't want to pay for SSD, Momentus XT is the way to go.

It's a lot faster than any other HDD.