I have had an HP pavilion dm4 1173cl for about 4 years now, it's been a great bulletproof laptop, but now it is really slowing down to the point where it is unusable. I already bought a new laptop to replace it, but I thought it might be worth $200 to buy a new hard drive and an 8gb ram upgrade to bring it back to life. On NewEgg I'm looking at 8gb DDR3 RAM (PC 12800) for $100 (http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA5751VB2283&cm_re=ddr3_8gb_laptop_ram-_-9SIA5751VB2283-_-Product)
and a HGST Traveler 1TB 7200 rpm 32mb cache hard drive for $80
(http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA54G1R09153&cm_re=1tb_laptop_hard_drive-_-22-145-881-_-Product)
The current ram is 4gb DDR3, and hard drive is 500GB SATA II.
I was hoping to do a full system image onto the new drive without cleaning out any files or reinstalling the OS; if I'm going to have to do that to get my speed back it's not really worth saving the laptop. I want to keep it usable exactly the way it is since i'ts got all my schoolwork from the past 4 years on it with all the programs I've used in various engineering classes. I've backed up all the data on external drives, so I'm not worried about losing it, I just don't want to bog down my new computer with all the old stuff that I might only use say once a year. The current 500GB hard drive has about 400GB on it; will doing a system image of this size just make the new hard drive as slow as the old one?
Thank you in advance!
and a HGST Traveler 1TB 7200 rpm 32mb cache hard drive for $80
(http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA54G1R09153&cm_re=1tb_laptop_hard_drive-_-22-145-881-_-Product)
The current ram is 4gb DDR3, and hard drive is 500GB SATA II.
I was hoping to do a full system image onto the new drive without cleaning out any files or reinstalling the OS; if I'm going to have to do that to get my speed back it's not really worth saving the laptop. I want to keep it usable exactly the way it is since i'ts got all my schoolwork from the past 4 years on it with all the programs I've used in various engineering classes. I've backed up all the data on external drives, so I'm not worried about losing it, I just don't want to bog down my new computer with all the old stuff that I might only use say once a year. The current 500GB hard drive has about 400GB on it; will doing a system image of this size just make the new hard drive as slow as the old one?
Thank you in advance!