The common hard drives in notebooks spin at 5400 rpm. Replacing the factory installed drive with a 7200 rpm is the fastest way to improve the overall performance of the computer as well as extend the life of an older notebook.

My Gateway CX2610 hard drive started to fail a few months ago and after struggling with multiple OS reinstallations, crashes, and fear of lost data, a search for a new hard drive was considered. The biggest hangup was the wish to not reinstall the OS and all of the software (again).

An Hitachi 200 GB 7200 rpm drive was the only 7200 hard drive found in the local stores. In fact, some retail employees insisted that I would not find a 5400 rpm drive. All of the sales were on 5400 rpm drives. The Hitachi purchase included disk cloning software and an external USB case. Unfortunately the process failed with an error: hdc lost interrupt. Another solution was needed.

After searching the Internet and talking to family members, Acronis True Image 11 looked promising. According to the site, TI is compatibile with Windows Vista and includes a clone feature that would create an image of the failing hard drive. The software would backup the hard drive and allow me to restore the image to a larger and faster drive. After purchasing the software from the Acronis site, I downloaded the 140 MB installation file. By running the installer as an administrator, the program installed without an error. If the 'run as administrator' is not chosen then the installation fails with a cryptic message that the installer was interrupted and to restart the installer.

• A bootable CD was created and tested.
• An image was created and saved on a USB external drive
• The new hard drive was installed into the Tablet PC.
• The system was started from the CD and a 2 hour restore process prepared the new drive.

Complete time for the upgrade was 3 hours (backup, replacement, and restore). Now bootup, programs, and loading webpages are all faster.