the hard drive in the laptop (80 gig) just isn't cutting it anymore, infact i just tried installing Illustrator and it had a nervous breakdown because there's not enough space.
now - is it is as easy as moving the programs i want to keeponto my external hard drive, change out the hard drive and reinstall Vista, then re install those programs - or am i missing something
The best way is to get a disk imaagine package ( Acronis TrueImage is what I use ).
Plug in external drive ( with plenty of space free ).
Boot with TrueImage CD.
Copy contents of lappy hard drive to external drive ( it can write everything on the hard drive to a single file).
Put new Hard drive in the lappy.
Boot with TrueImage CD
Copy contents back to new drive.
Done.
Well, if you're reinstalling programs then there'll be no need to push them to an external drive first (sorry, being pedantic before someone else comes along and says it more nastily).
Pretty sure you'll not be able to just copy programs files across to the external HDD and then reinstall windows (I'm assuming windows here). There'll be registry settings and all sorts that'll just not be there when you copy back the files.
If you've got the installation disks/files then that's the way to go - just backup any stuff you want to keep - your files, images, mp3 etc.
I've used xxclone quite successfully - it'll write your HDD to an external drive lock stock and barrel, then swapped the disks around and it's worked without problem.
Using a disk image will avoid the need to reinstall windows and all your aplications etc.