Clone drives?

[Aznboy1993]

I have 3 Alienware M11XR2 laptops that have 120GB hard drive in them. I bought 3 Hitachi Travelstar 500GB hard drives to replace them. However, I have a few questions before I start.

1.) If the laptop came with a DVD to reinstall the OS can I just replace the drives and install the OS using the DVD provided? (Will it be activated?)

2.) Or, is it a better idea to clone the original drive and restore the image onto the new drive?

3.) Or, is there a better way that I do not know of?

Thanks~

 

[Gilthanis]

Being that Dell owns Alienware, it really depends on how old they are. Since Dell disks usually automatically activate on Dell systems, I would assume these would as well. There is only one way to find out.

 

[Sabrewulf...]

If you have a good install, all updated and working great, there is absolutely no reason to hastle with a reinstall, (drivers, Windows updates, programs, games, tweaking, A BIG PAIN IN THE ASS) just image (clone) the drives, I've done it many times when needing some more space or catching that super deal on a bigger or faster drive.

I always use Acronis True Image, its the best.

 

[tontork]

Being that Dell owns Alienware, it really depends on how old they are. Since Dell disks usually automatically activate on Dell systems, I would assume these would as well. There is only one way to find out.

Dell/HP/Lenovo tend to have their software already activated, the latter two for sure. On my thinkpad, it was place the two dvds in, wait for it to finish installing, and then boot into windows. No activating, no driver installs, and I was fortunate Lenovo didn't include any crapware on the DVDs. I still had to install the windows updates, office/office updates, chrome, dropbox, netbeans/textpad, and the JDK.

If you have a ton of software that you need to install, i would recommend cloning the drive. If you only have a few applications I would use the dvds.