It’s time to upgrade the hard drive in my laptop

It’s time. I’ve been putting it off for a while, but I can’t escape the fact that it’s time to replace the hard drive in my laptop, and to be honest a Black Friday sale helped. Now there are many ways to do this, and there isn’t a best way. In my opinion, it’s a matter of opinion.

I have chosen to keep it simple and to keep it clean.

So:
1 All my personal stuff is already automatically backed up to OneDrive. My emails live on IMAP servers – iCloud.com, Gmail.com and work. Calendars and the like are safe in Apple’s and Google’s ecosystems.
2 I will copy all my personal stuff: docs, photos, music and the like to an external drive immediately before the upgrade.
3 I have created a brand new Windows boot disk on a smaller memory stick.

That’s it.

Tomorrow evening, I will swap in the new 2TB (terabytes, 2,000GB) drive, install Windows and Microsoft 365 on it, run the updates, copy my docs etc from the external drive and then kick off OneDrive, set up my email and complete the same setup that I have done for many of you. Add in a few other apps (Zoom, Express VPN, Chrome, Google Drive and Chat) and change the settings to make Windows safe and the job will be done.

As with all jobs like this, please wish me luck and I’ll keep you posted…

It’s all good

Am delighted (and relieved) to report that I’m posting this update on my upgraded laptop! There were hiccups: two ‘blue screens of death’ when Windows crashed during its install and then when the laptop booted it had two Windows installations on the new drive, so I deleted the one not being used.

The best, and relatively new feature is that both Microsoft and Google stored all my settings in their clouds, including which apps I had previously installed, so my laptop setup recreated itself remarkably easily.

And that was that. I set off updates and downloads and this morning the laptop is all set and blisteringly fast. Faster than my speed of thought anyway…

So I now have a clean Windows 22H2 installation with nothing on it that I don’t want and a laptop that will last me for years to come. It took about three hours of my time.

Happy days 🙂