>>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!
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>Sounds good....
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>Or, you could install the new hard drive as a Slave-drive, then run DiscWizard or MaxBlast from Seagate (it it is a Seagate drive or you have one already installed), to CLONE the old drive to the new drive. Then remove the old drive and save it, and make the new drive the boot drive. But make sure you have good back ups first!!

Awww.. Backups are for SISSIES!