Increase The Memory Of My Laptop

[begsaresponse]

I have a Dell Latitude D610. I would like to increase the hard drive memory.

My concern is how is that done by say a technicial here in Pattaya? As they insert the additional memory are they able to copy data thats on the existing memory to their own machine?

Can anyone recommend a shop where this can be done?

Am I right to be concerned?

begsaresponse

[monty]

The proper way to do this is to make an image of your drive onto the new bigger drive (connected to your laptop while sitting in an external enclosure).

Then take out the old hard drive and replace with the new one, and everything should be up and running but with more capacity (you don't really call the space on a hard disk "memory"!).

There's other members here having experience with several shops in TukCom, they will guide you to the good ones (and they are there!)

[begsaresponse]

So does the old drive still retain memory?

[BelfastMike]

So does the old drive still retain memory?

Up to you.

They can either leave the old data on the drive or format it.

Personally, I would buy an external USB enclosure and use the old drive as external storage.

[MisterMan]

Just do it yourself. I did it. I actually sucessfully upgraded the RAM in my laptop!!! And it was only through helo from TV members!! They were patient and informative.

Here is the thread! Good luck!

[bkk_mike]

Personally, I just replaced my laptop drive myself a couple of days ago. However, unlike Monty, I take swapping hard drives as the perfect opportunity to do a clean install of the operating system, and applications.

I still also bought the external enclosure for the old hard drive - initially to copy data off it, but once I'm happy I've got everything I need off it, I'll reformat it and use it as extra external storage.

As for the question of whether the data is still on the old hard drive - the answer is YES... - and even if you delete all the files and reformat the hard drive, the data can still be recovered fairly easily. The only way to totally clean the hard drive is to use special tools that repeatedly write 1s and 0s on every sector of the drive, and even then, it can possibly be restored unless you repeat the task at different ambient temperatures. (although it's no longer a trivial task to restore the data).

There is a good reason why anybody who is vaguely technical generally never throws away a hard drive - I have drives going back more than 10 years. And, if the data is in any way sensitive, you should really do the transfer yourself. (My own PCs, I generally hold sensitive data in an encrypted file mounted as a partition using Truecrypt. - On my office laptop, there's full-disk encryption and you need to enter the encryption password before windows can boot up.)

[RKASA]

Why change the drive if all you need is more space then plug the new exten USB drive in and start using it to store data and make room on the old drive by sending stuff over there.  Then its just a plug and play operation.  If you want the old drive cleaned get errasr program it can wipe free un used space and completely delete files you want to remove.  Use Ccleaner and it will wipe the old .data files that Mr. bill uses to

 record everything you do in windows.

The good thing about these two tools is you can keep things clean almost daily, and with USB you can add more and more drives not problem.