question about upgrading our hard drive

hi i just got a new laptop and it has an 80 gig 7200 RPM hard drive, i thought this would be enough because i have an external to hold all my misc. crap..... however after getting it i have found that after vista is installed and all the programs and stuff i only have about 48 gigabytes to work with... i highly doubt this is going to be enough so i want to upgrade... im wondering though... if i backup all my stuff onto another hard drive and then switch them will it be the exact same settings and everything as before the switch? or will i have to do all my settings and everything all over again?question about upgrading our hard drive
youll lose any windows settings and stuff of course.  if youre going to put it back on the new harddrive then youll have to reinstall meaning yes youll lose everything unless you backup like profiles for things like firefox or thunderbird or games, etc.  im not positive, prove me wrong, but i dont think you can just copy and past program files and then put it back on the new hdd and work, i dont think it works like that. i just backup all the exe%26#39;s and my saved profiles for programs and games, so reinstalling windows on a new hdd takes like 5 min to get it where it was after installing windows, drivers, and updatesquestion about upgrading our hard drive
ok thanks, i guess ill just stick with this one and try to keep the ammount of crap to a minimum
[QUOTE=''ncderek'']youll lose any windows settings and stuff of course. if youre going to put it back on the new harddrive then youll have to reinstall meaning yes youll lose everything unless you backup like profiles for things like firefox or thunderbird or games, etc. im not positive, prove me wrong, but i dont think you can just copy and past program files and then put it back on the new hdd and work, i dont think it works like that. i just backup all the exe%26#39;s and my saved profiles for programs and games, so reinstalling windows on a new hdd takes like 5 min to get it where it was after installing windows, drivers, and updates[/QUOTE]if you just copy and paste its not going to work. you have to use a process called ''ghosting''. ghosting mirrors the hard drive bit for bit onto another hard drive. i know norton makes a ghosting utility. but if you were to ghost your current laptop drive, then put the ghost image on your new one you would be good to go.  
oh cool, ill have to check into that because that seems like exactly what i want, so your saying that putting the ghost drive in would be identical to the one i have now?
Look up Norton Ghost on google, it will do the job, it just copies your hard drive exactly as it is onto another one...
[QUOTE=''patsimms111'']oh cool, ill have to check into that because that seems like exactly what i want, so your saying that putting the ghost drive in would be identical to the one i have now?[/QUOTE]yup. its an exact copy of your hard drive. the norton one is pretty good a lot of enterprise orginizations use it. 
does norton ghost cost money? and does it save it all to one file that you re-drag and open up and sort of download? how does it work?
[QUOTE=''ncderek'']does norton ghost cost money? and does it save it all to one file that you re-drag and open up and sort of download? how does it work?[/QUOTE]yes it does cost money. what you would do is ghost a hard drive, then you could slave the blank drive and use the norton to copy the image over.  
I use Acronis True Image 10 over Norton%26#39;s Ghost altough I have both applicaions. Acronis also makes a program called Migrate Easy which may be all you need to get the job done. Worth a look.