What is required to upgrade a laptop hard drive?

I know this doesn’t really answer your question. But I feel like putting in my two cents.

It might be a good time to start from scratch on the new hard drive. I’m going to assume you have all the original install disks for the OS and major software. Every once in a while a fresh start feels good. I am always amazed at how much crap gets built-up over the years.

And now someone will hopefully come along and actually answer your question.sorry for the derail

Oh yes, It will be a mostly clean install. Only files I took are things I really need for work, and a bunch of setup programs for software.

The easiest way to upgrade a laptop’s hard drive is by getting an extra HD enclosure. When I upgraded my inspiron 6000’s HD, heres what i did:
1. I bought an additional external 2.5” hard drive enclosure from ebay for 8.99 (with shipping).
2. Connect the new laptop that you are going to this external hd enclosure.
3. I used a cloning software to copy my old hd to this external hd enclosure(which has my new hd). I used a pirated copy of Norton Ghost to do the job. There are other free tools but i decided to go for the pro version.
4. Once you are done copying, just take out the new HD from the enclosure.
5. Swap it with the new drive.

But if you dont want to invest, you’ll need a windows installation cd and to make sure that you have the latest version of bios installed on your computer. You might also want to download all the drivers to your external hd since you’ll need to install them afterwards

IF YOU HAVE VISTA:

Get Acronis True Image, and if you happen to have an external backup, you make a backup of your hard drive to your external, make the acronis boot CD, install the new hard drive, let Acronis reinstall everything back onto your new hard drive (unfortunately you have to buy the dumb program else the backup won’t run “outside of windows” which you won’t have windows running anyway with a blank harddrive… blah blah, it’s basically the same steps as norton ghost; but norton doesn’t work on vista for some odd reason.

IF YOU HAVE XP:

norton ghost, follow mirza’s instructions.

sometimes torx screwdrivers are needed to access the hdd bay; I don’t know if this aplies to dell laptops though

EDIT: I’m stupid. I didn’t read your whole question. Sorry!