 If your PC is more than a year or so old, it probably has a hard drive that is small enough to be swallowed up quite quickly by the huge demands of modern home and office programmes. Your hard drive is used as semi-permanent storage of all of your programmes, data files, and for the Windows operating system itself. Modern office suites of programmes use hundreds of megabytes of storage at a time, as do the huge graphic and sound files stored on your hard drive by many modern 3D games. Installation of Windows 2000 requires over 800 Megabytes of hard drive space alone, so older machines that may have been fitted with just one or two Gigabytes in total will very soon run out of space. If your hard drive space runs low, Windows has to work harder and harder to find space available for its swap file. This is the clever memory management system that allows your PC to run programmes and use datafiles that would add up to far more than your actual RAM memory would hold. It does this by swapping chunks of data that are not actually in use at the time to and fro between your RAM memory and hard drive storage.  It is easy to see how much space remains on your hard drive. Simply double click the “My Computer” icon on your desktop and a window will pop open on your desktop showing all your drives and other peripherals. Click on the icon for your hard drive once to highlight it, then a little pie chart will open on the left of your screen showing how much of the drive is used, and how much is free. (This is dependent on your system configuration). If the amount of free space left is under 1000 Mb, it is worth considering fitting a new hard drive. Hard drives with huge capacities are now very inexpensive, so additional storage space has never been more economical. You can either replace your existing hard drive or, somewhat more simply, add an additional drive and re-install some or all of your programmes there, leaving your original C drive for the Windows operating system, and possibly the Windows swap file and some of your own document files.  Before you fit your new hard drive, you will need to open the case of your PC. Before you start to take screws out of the case, you should unplug everything, especially the mains supply cables. Modern PC power supplies are very well insulated, even once you lift the lid off your PC, but it simply isn’t worth taking chances with either your safety or your PC’s! One touch with a screwdriver in the wrong place inside a PC that is inadvertently switched on will easily destroy the fine foil tracks on your motherboard. |
| Once everything is safely unplugged
and you have the base unit standing on a stable, well lit surface, turn it
around to look at the rear of the case. The screws that hold the lid on should
be quite easy to see, usually cross head or Philips screws. Try your best to
take off only those that hold the outer case lid on, or things may fall off
inside your PC! There will probably be additional screws in either the sides of
the case or underneath each side rim or flange where it wraps under the
chassis. Once you have undone the screws, you should be able to fairly easily slide the lid back and up to take it off completely, for a normal desktop or slim-line case. Tower and mini-tower cases are often very similar, although some have a separate plate or part lid that may be removed to gain access to the top of the motherboard. There are also a few case designs where the entire front panel and case surround is like a large sleeve that will need to be withdrawn from the front of the PC once the screws are removed, like a drawer. These designs won’t have a flanged arrangement at the rear of the case, though screws at the rear and side of the case may well still fix them. Once you have removed the case lid, take a good look around inside the PC to find the best place to fit your new hard drive. It may well be that there is a spare mounting position next to the existing C drive, which tends to make cabling easier as well. If not, you can use another cable to connect to the new hard drive. Before you fit the new hard drive, there is something you will need to set up. Most hard drives are fitted with a set of jumpers or links that tell them if another hard drive is fitted to the system and, if so, whether they are the master drive (which the system boots from) or the slave (supplemental) drive. Unscrew the existing hard drive and disconnect the broad flat data cable and 4- way coloured power cable to examine it closely. You may, in some cases, have to remove the mounting cage from the case to extract the hard drive, or sometimes to unscrew and remove neighbouring CD-ROM or floppy drives, which should simply slide out through the front of your case once any mounting screws are removed. If you have to remove any power or data cables to do this, note their orientation, although most will only fit one way around anyway. Look at your existing hard drive and see if there is a little chart showing the options for jumper settings. There are usually different jumper positions for the following options: Master, no slave present. Master, slave present. Slave. If this is the case, and you wish to continue to boot your machine up from the original hard drive (much the easiest option), then change the linking arrangements on your hard drive to the “Master, slave present” option. If you are unlucky enough to have a hard drive where the jumper arrangements are not so conveniently described, the best thing to do is |