does anyone know if you can upgrade a hard drive on a dell latitude x300?

[swimmersteve]

Thanks for your help.

 

[jvarszegi]

You should be able to. Just purchase an upgrade kit if you want a seamless upgrade; it'll transfer all of your applications, OS settings, etc. and you'll have hardly anything to do.


I purchased a hard-drive upgrade from this place (shop around to get the best price before you pick a vendor):

http://www.cmsproducts.com/


The transfer was pretty seamless, and took about four hourse using the supplied PCMCIA card. There was one minor glitch with transferring some stuff in the Documents and Settings folder, which I shun like the plague anyway. Basically, the OS and all of my applications came up fine. The operating system didn't seem to know that anything had happened, although the device information was correct afterwards.


My battery life increased slightly after the upgrade to a 7200 RPM Hitachi drive. I only mention this to allay your fears in this regard, because the X300 doesn't have very long battery life to begin with, unless you're using the extended battery.


You'll spend a little extra for the transfer kit, but nothing really horrible. Basically, here's how it will go if you use a kit:


1. Buy the hard drive and the kit. The new hard drive can be any laptop 2.5" hard drive, including the 60GB 7200 RPM ones or one of the 80 or even 100GB models. Here, my only advice is to try to anticipate your use for the useful life of everything else in the laptop; you don't want to incur this extra expense twice. Also, the performance difference just between 4200RPM and 54000RPM is huge, and from there to 7200RPM is another big step. Unless my memory fails me, you should already have a 5400RPM drive, yes?

2. Install the transfer software.

3. Plug the PCMCIA card from the transfer kit into your computer.

4. Attach the ribbon cable (sticking out of the external end of the PCMCIA card) to your new drive.

5. Make sure every program is disabled, including screen savers (I might be superstitious, but I like to be safe). This includes disabling just about every Windows service you can.

6. Kick off the transfer, and sit back and wait nervously.

7. After the transfer, shut the machine off and do the hardware swap. Be very, very careful if you haven't done it before; the hard drive pins are easy to bend. It's important to go slow, and pull the old hard drive out of its dock with even pressure, or else one side will come loose quickly, bending the pins on the other side. Don't be afraid, just careful. If you don't know what to unscrew on the case to expose the hard drive, go to Dell's site and look at the manual.

8. Shut the machine on. It should boot fine. Convert your old drive into a backup device.


The only difference if you don't pony up for the transfer kit is that you'll have to reinstall the OS and all your programs, which may include a call to Microsoft to reactivate your OS on the new drive.