A computer that ships with multiple hard drives or contains space for additional disks can be a useful investment for any business. I'll explain why someone like me might need to, and why the average computer user probably doesn't any more.Ģ015 in Review - A look at the most popular Ask Leo! articles of 2015, as well as an overview of those that got the most comments (hint: you'll nod your head in understanding on why one topic, more than any other, might generate so much discussion in 2015). How to Change a Primary or Secondary Hard Drive on a Dell Laptop. Things are better in more recent versions. Why Do You Regularly Reinstall Your System? - With older versions of Windows it wasn't uncommon to want to reinstall from scratch every so often. So what does it mean if the SIP is using 100% CPU on your slow system? Why Your System is Slow Even Though the CPU Is Idle - The purpose of the System Idle Process is to get out of the way to let other processes run. I'll review common troubleshooting techniques. In that case, you’ll want to reinstall the applications that you care about on to that hard drive.ĭealing with Browser Problems - Browser problems can be caused by any number of things that may or may not include the browser itself. In other words, if you’re keeping the hard drive in that replacement machine and you’re thinking of somehow adding your original hard drive, then the replacement machine’s hard drive becomes your operating system.

You can copy files off of it without any problems.Ĭhances are that there’s no room in the laptop for a second hard drive, so this is commonly an external drive scenario. If you’re moving the old hard drive to the replacement machine in addition to whatever hard drive is there right now, then your old hard drive simply becomes a data drive. The MAC address factors into some of the calculations that go on when deciding whether or not a machine has already been activated. For example, the MAC address of a network card would be different from one machine to the next – even if it’s the same model.

Some of the information that’s used to identify your computer will have changed. One issue that you might run into is activation. How well the swap works actually depends on just how identical this replacement machine really is compared to your original. You’re going to replace it with the hard drive on the original machine, which has the operating system and all of the applications and data that you already have. As you’ve probably worked out, this solution simply reverts the driver back to the standard Microsoft controller driver you would have on a clean install.

Become a Patron of Ask Leo! and go ad-free! Performing the swapįirst of all, the operating system on the used machine doesn’t matter. Now shutdown the computer, remove the hard drive and install it on another computer, or replace the old motherboard.

Replace hard drive dell laptop