Swapping Hard Disk Drives & changing OS?

My laptop recently died on me. I guess i was pretty careless with it and now it's just useless. I went to a local Laptop Repair Shop, and the guy said there was no point in wasting the HDD, so he took it out of the laptop and put it into something i think he called a Caddy. I can now use it as an external hard drive. It's meant to be 120GB, but only ever recognises 111GB, but that's not my problem.



My problem is i'm planning to buy a second hand laptop soon. It's 2GB of RAM, which would do me nicely because if i'm honest i'm only using the laptop for very basic of things like word processing, MSN, ebay and photo editing, nothing big like Gaming, but the Hardrive is only 40GB and i just think that's too small. Would i be able to swap my old Hardrive for this one? How would i go about doing that?



The second hand laptop i'm possibly buying is also Windows XP, which, contrary to popular belief, is horrible to use. I hate the way it feels; i'm too used to Vista. Would i be able to replace it with Vista, and how would i do that?Swapping Hard Disk Drives %26amp; changing OS?
It depends, as far as the hard drive. Hard drives come with different connectors, i.e. PATA, SATA, SCSI, and the laptop you're getting might no have the kind of connector in it for the kind of hard drive you have. One way to find out what kind of hard drive you have is to take it out of whatever the guy put in and look at the information on the sticker attached to hard drive--it might say if it's a SATA or ATA (i.e. PATA) on the outside. Then find out from whomever you're getting the 2nd-hand laptop what kind of hard drive it is, as well as if there are other hard drive slots on the laptop. But since you're using your hard drive as an external now, you should at least be able to keep using it as an external with the ';new'; laptop.



You can get the laptop, get a Vista software installation disc and then upgrade from XP to Vista. Those discs are usually expensive, though (assuming you're not buying bootleg copies, which may or may not work). I prefer XP, so which one is better is a personal opinion thing.Swapping Hard Disk Drives %26amp; changing OS?
You are right about the operating system.After you use Vista for a while,XP feels like a Micky Mouse OS.Unfortunately ,you can transfer all your personal files from drive to drive but not the operating system.You have to call the computer makers and request the OS DVD.Even if you want to keep the dead XP it won't boot on the new computer because it has hardware info on the registry from another computer.You'll have to reinstall .