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With your shiny new hard disk ordered, you'll need to transfer your old data across to the new operating system install. If you're going for a clean install instead of the Vista upgrade disc, this is easily achieved, the most straightforward approach being to back up your My Documents folder and other important files to a blank CD-R or DVD-R, then copying this back to your new system once it's been installed.

However, if you plan to keep your old notebook drive, you might want to invest in a USB-to-SATA or IDE cable, or even a notebook hard disk caddy. Either of these will allow you to pull your files directly off your old drive once Vista is installed on the new one. PC Pro's Recommended notebook hard disk caddy is the Dynamode USB Caddy for 2.5 Hard Drive - a mere £6 exc VAT from www.techstore.co.uk.

Finally, it's worth noting that there are some new technologies in the pipeline that may be worth waiting for. Vista has built-in support for a technology called ReadyDrive, which provides support for hybrid hard disks. This new type of hard disk has large amounts of flash memory built in on top of the normal buffer memory, and promises to improve both performance and battery life.

Further down the line are solid-state disk drives (SSDs), which are only just beginning to appear in some sub-notebooks and UMPCs. Sony's VAIO UX1 and Samsung's Q1-SSD both feature solid-state disks. These offer significant performance advantages, have lower power requirements and the lack of moving

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parts makes them very robust, but in return they're very expensive and capacities are currently limited to 64GB.

Optical drive

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DVD writers only recently became standard issue in notebooks, so it's possible your machine is equipped with just a CD writer or, worse, just a CD-ROM drive. And if you don't have a DVD-ROM drive at the very least, you won't be able to even load Vista without asking Microsoft to send you the CD version (for a fee, of course).

If this is the case, you're obviously going to want to upgrade to one of the newer multifunction DVD writers. If you're feeling really flush, a Blu-ray or HD DVD drive might be on the shopping list.

There's bad news when it comes to optical drives, though. Notebook drives were once mostly modular and, as a result, easy to remove and replace. Some manufacturers, such as Lenovo, Sony and Dell, still produce notebooks with modular bays. However, in the last few years this practice has become less widespread, and there's been a movement towards making the optical drive more of a permanent fixture in notebooks. The result is that replacing notebook optical drives isn't as easy as it could be.

You'll be happy to discover that, even if a call to your retailer/manufacturer reveals no possibilities or, worse, that the upgrade is prohibitively expensive, it isn't too difficult to repurpose a standard notebook optical drive and fit that instead.

To find out if your drive can be removed, check the underside of your machine: on some, you can simply flick a switch to unlock the drive and pull it straight out; on others, you'll have to undo a screw or two before it can be extracted.

If it can, you're in luck. Pretty much all optical drives in notebooks use a parallel IDE interface so, in theory, all you need to do once the drive is out is remove any guide rails and hardware from the drive's edges, unclip the drawer front, transfer all these items across to the new drive and then simply slot it back in.