1. Hard Drive Upgrades + Notebook = Pain

New applications and bit-hungry operating systems continue to fill hard drive space to the brim. Once the cap is reached, a hard drive upgrade is practically inevitable. This holds true not only for the desktop PC, but for the notebook as well.

Moreover, notebooks are no longer portable word processors but increasingly serve as multimedia machines as well. Today, notebooks are used to store and edit digital photos, as well as audio and video content. These applications are thus taxing notebooks' precious hard-drives more than ever.

The hard drive manufacturers' response to the notebook sector's outcry: offer faster drives with higher storage capacities for the portable market. The giants of this market segment are the 2.5" models with a whopping 80 GB of capacity, with the fastest spinning at 7200rpm.

Once the decision to upgrade has been made, the question remains how to transfer the data from the old disk to its replacement. One possibility is to copy the old drive onto a PC hard drive.

This adaptor lets you connect a 2.5" hard drive to a standard PC via an IDE -connector.

The picture only shows the adaptor!

First, the old drive is removed from the notebook and then connected to an IDE channel on the desktop PC using an adapter. Next, an image of the drive can be created using tools such as Norton Ghost or Power Quest Drive Image. Finally, the PC must shut down, and the old drive replaced with the new and larger one, onto which the image can then be restored.

The drawbacks of this method are obvious. For one thing, it requires the user to at least partly disassemble both the notebook and the desktop system. F Moreover, the storage capacity of the old drive can't longer be used while it remains unconnected to the notebook PC.

Also, this method of upgrading brings with it several possible sources for errors. For example, one or more drives could be irreparably damaged if the IDE cable were connected the wrong way.

The EZ-upgrade, on the other hand, makes upgrading a hard drive child's play. At least that's what Apricorn, its manufacturer, claims. We were intrigued, so THG tried to find out if reality and advertising coincided for a change.