Earlier in 2007 I added a Lenovo T61 laptop to my stable of computers. It's been a very nice travel and office machine, but I wanted to install a larger hard drive and get more speed from it. So that was one of my projects over the holiday break.

More hard drive capacity was fairly straightforward. Buy a larger HDD and install it. But I didn't want just bigger, I wanted faster too. And as always, hard drives are getting larger and faster, at lower prices. I was able to find a 200GB 7200RPM 2.5-inch Hitachi drive from ZipZoomFly for about $170, so snapped it up. Installation took less than five minutes, having to remove only one screw to pull the drive.

On the speed side, I'd done enough reading and talking to smarter friends to realize that a clean install of Vista would help. What that meant was that when I added the new hard drive, I'd install Windows Vista without the Lenovo drivers. In addition to the drivers you need (such as video, network and wireless), most computer manufacturers add a lot of software you can probably live without, and losing those may speed up both booting and operation.

If you're interested in doing this, I'd suggest a few things. First, make a list of all the software you've currently got installed (you'll need to re-install it) and deactivate any programs that require that (such as Photoshop). Second, gather the drivers you think you'll need, or the disk the computer came with that included the drivers. A nice spot on the web to find more information on your laptop and this sort of thing is www.notebookreview.com. In there I found a good article by Justin Stigall on doing exactly what I wanted to do, a clean install of Vista on a Lenovo T61. While it would have been nice if I'd found it BEFORE I did the install, finding it afterwards helped me get the wireless working. If you want to see his story, go to http://jstigall.googlepages.com/t61clean.html.

Expect to spend some time using trial and error (I specialize in error) to get it all working. In my case, a couple of hours was all it took to swap out the HDD and get the new install up and running. And it is faster. Boot time is probably half of what it was before.

Now all that's left is to put the 100GB drive pulled from the laptop into a portable USB SATA enclosure (anywhere from $10-$20 from places like www.dealnews.com or buy.com) and filling up the new 200GB of hard drive space I just added. With any luck, I won't need to replace that hard drive with a larger one for at least six months...