One of my many gifts from the holiday was a long-sought-after hard drive upgrade.  Not just any ol’ hard drive though;  I got one of the latest-greatest Solid State Drives.  While generally having a much smaller capacity and much high price tag than a traditional drive, the new SSD’s are also considerably faster and, having no moving parts, totally silent.  These two things made it a perfect fit for my home theater PC, a Lenovo Q150.  So, after much comparison shopping and user-review reading, I decided on the Samsung 470 series drive, 128 gig model.  That doesn’t sound like a whole lot of space in these days of multi-terabyte drives, but it’s more than enough for the computer I put it in, as I only use it to surf the web and stream movies.

The drive replacement wasn’t quite as easy as I anticipated, but then nothing seems to be easy these days.  For one thing, the directions for opening the case were entirely wrong.  The best I could figure out from googling the issue was that Lenovo knows the manual is wrong and they are going to update it someday.  Isn’t that helpful.  Following somebody’s advice of “use a guitar pick,” I finally got it apart by prying it open with one of my many Chopper-Shopper cards.  (I knew those things would come in handy some day.)  Once open, it was quickly apparent the instructions for removing the drive were wrong also, but I’d pretty much given up on reading the directions by then anyway.  I got the new drive installed finally though, and even managed to put the case back together without any breakage.

After confirming everything worked on the new drive, I set about putting Windows back on it.  My plan was to install Windows 7 from scratch using the DVD’s I’d bought a few years ago, and then use the serial number that came with the computer to activate it.  This plan, not entirely surprisingly, did not work.  For whatever reason, I couldn’t activate the Windows install.  So, rather than spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out why, I switched to plan B, which was to image the old drive over to the new one.  This strategy, after a little trial and error, eventually worked out.  I have a little kit that lets you hook up drives to USB ports, so first I got that all working.  Once it saw both drives, I tried to use Norton Ghost to copy everything over.  They had included this software with the new drive, presumably just for this purpose, but it didn’t work at all.  It complained about the different partition sizes on the two disks, and wouldn’t let me duplicate an external drive to an internal.  I cursed it for a while, then switched over to Acronis 2012, which I happened to have purchased recently, and it worked quite flawlessly.  Once it finished copying, I booted up the new drive and took it for a test drive.  It works quite fabulously.  Noticeably quieter, and the speed difference is rather remarkable.  They also run cooler than a traditional drive, so hopefully it makes my little mini-pc last longer too, as I leave it running all the time.  As long as it lasts the duration of the supposed 3 year warranty, I am quite pleased with the upgrade.