It appears that the hard drive on Ms Engineer’s Acer laptop is knackered. It has slowed down to a ridiculous level and we’ve tried various methods to revive it. Question – if I fit a new hard drive, can I copy Windows off the old one? It seems a bit unfair to have to buy another Windows disc when the laptop’s only 18 months old.

Yes, but if it is failing then the data you copy across might be broken. Can you not just re-install from the Laptop system DVD?

Or do you not have the DVD?

Rachel

That’s two questions.

1) can you reuse your existing licence to reinstall the OS? Yes.

2) can you “copy” the existing running gear? Yes, with the caveat that it depends how knackered the current disk / build is. You’d need something like Acronis or Gparted, and a means of caddying the new drive into the laptop. Failing that you may need to reinstall from scratch. Do you have a recovery disc (or the ability to make one from your current install)?

Also,

Are you sure it’s a hardware failure and not a software issue? Seatools or similar can test the disk, a factory reload will wipe and reinstall the OS. The exact process for this varies between manufacturers.

^ +1

Unless it quite old (at least 3 years) or very new, unless physically damaged (dropped) HDD’s tend to last quite well. I’d be looking at some sort of malware issue, and do a factory reset.

She didn’t get any discs with it, so how do you reset everything?

Hopefully it will have a recovery partition, after backing up any data you want to keep try:

http://malwaretips.com/threads/how-to-access-acer-system-recovery-partition-hotkey-instructions.161/

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmVT0Z9r6_Q[/video]

There will probably be the ability to burn your own restore DVD. Look for something like “Acer Recovery.” Even if you’re going to do as z1ppy says I’d burn the disc first; useful thing to have, belt and braces.

it is a good point, well made.

Right, thanks. I’ll try the windows restore tonight …..

How has it slowed down to a ridiculous level? Just on start-up or all the time?
My laptop did this recently – slowed to a veritable crawl, particularly on start-up.
Trying to work out why this had happened, I realised I had dumped a ‘temp’ photo folder on the desktop and hadn’t removed it. It was a large folder and once it was removed, normal service was resumed.

I can’t remember they whys and whatnots, but I remember reading ages ago that storing a lot of files on the desktop really slows the computer down.
There are conflicting views on the interweb about whether it should cause a problem, given that ‘the desktop’ is just another folder location really, but for my laptop it made a huge difference.