Old laptop, hard drive full, what to do...?

Flashy

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Hello, all. Just after a bit of advice, really. My four-and-a-half-year-old Dell Inspiron 1501's 160GB hard drive is very nearly full, almost exclusively with music, but quite a few pictures and videos, too. I was just going to buy a portable drive and move media to that, but then I got thinking...

Should I get an external drive and plug that in, or would I be better off replacing the current drive with a new 2.5in internal drive and starting from scratch?

Pro would be that I could then use the current drive as a back-up for pictures etc. Con is that I don't know how complicated it is setting up from scratch with a new drive – my prior experience of upgrading goes no further than changing desktop RAM.

That's not to say I'm not willing to give it a go. I've still got the Windows install disc and everything else it came with, so it's the practicalities of it that are the concern, rather than worries about having the resources.

From the bit of research I've done, it looks like a portable drive would be the cheaper and easier option in the short-term, but I can see it being a bit cumbersome having a box, however small, permanently connected to the laptop.

Or, should I just dig a little deeper and get a NAS?

Any advice or comments would be greatly appreciated.
 
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Thanks, that's good to know (and sounds relatively straightforward). How simple would a total reinstall be, out of interest? I've no doubt there's a load of rubbish on there that's accumulated over the years, so not totally averse to starting from scratch, providing it's within my ability, of course.
 
A reinstall should be fine if you have the Windows install disc and a driver disc (otherwise you will need to download the drivers from the Dell support website).
 
Thanks again. I'll have a rummage for the discs later and see if I've got all I need.
 
Ended up going for the easy option and have just ordered a 500GB portable drive from Tesco Direct, as I had a £20 voucher and £15-worth of Clubcard vouchers knocking about. So a £40 drive ended up costing me a fiver, which I thought seemed like a decent price at the moment, especially when compared to internal drives from elsewhere.

Thanks again for your advice, though, and it's not to say I won't consider upgrading the drive in future, but this may well tide me over for a couple of years until the laptop starts to lag behind too far in other areas.
 

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