Thanks for the tips.

I am adopting your philosophy of installing a new OS clean. The problems I had under Vista seem to still exist under Win7. Freeman time!

Have seen some great prices on OEM drives but don't think I want to poke around for cables, screws, brackets, instructions, and whatnot. I don't mess with hardware often enough to be confident in that approach. Everything in the box, please.

>I do this frequently <g>
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>You can get a 1TB hd now for under $100. ( Amazon, NewEgg.com or Ecost.com ) Should be able to get a WD or Seagate for $80 or so with free shipping. 1.5TB for about $100.
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>Just plug in the new HD, boot from the Windows 7 DVD, create thew new HD as a boot drive. The system should see the other drive as a slave. ( no more jumpers with SATA drives )
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>I'd reinstall clean on the new drive, copy files over from the old drive as needed.
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>I remember you said you upgraded a Vista to a Win7. My first rule of OS has always been never ever upgrade. Install clean.
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>Oh, and if you buy a "bare drive"/OEM be sure you have an SATA cable laying around or order one with the drive.
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>>My main home computer has accumulated enough junk that it has become a little iffy, even after a recent upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate. Installs and uninstalls are particularly dicey. Also, the hard drive is only 160 GB and down to about 30 GB free. I am considering two alternatives. One is to migrate everything to what has been a spare computer used only for developmentm making the current main computer the spare. The other is to buy a bigger hard drive and start fresh on that. The purpose of this post is to do a sanity check on the plan if I take door number two. Am I missing anything here? ---
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>>1. Back up everything from the current HD to an external USB hard drive. This is already happening. The USB drive has backups from Norton Ghost and a daily automated backup by Backup4All. For good measure, I use Carbonite to keep everything backed up on the internet.
>>2. Test that I have a bootable DVD disc. I think the Ghost install/recovery disc will do.
>>3. Replace the hard drive.
>>4. Reinstall Windows 7 clean.
>>5. Reinstall applications.
>>6. Restore data files from the external HD.
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>>Any gotchas I should be aware of or am overlooking?
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>>Also, if I do buy a new hard drive, any recommendations of sellers?
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>>Thanks!