Is your old laptop hard drive running out of space? You probably know that you can upgrade your desktop computer's hard drive. But you may not know that you can upgrade the hard drive on your laptop. Here, we'll show you how to double or even triple the hard drive space on your laptop.

What you need
Let's run through how to upgrade a ThinkPad with a 30GB hard drive. In this case, we'll change it to a 100GB drive that I bought on the Web。You'll also need some software that will clone the old drive. Cloning turns your new drive into an exact replica of the old one, so all you have to do is swap it in and boot up. You'll also need a way to attach the new hard drive to the laptop.

I bought an EZ upgrade kit that included a case for attaching the new hard drive and came with data transfer software. That's the easiest way to go. It also lets you turn your old drive into an additional external drive after you're done upgrading.

Before you begin
Before you start the data transfer, you must clean up your old drive. Delete any unwanted files and uninstall programs you don't use. You don't want to waste time transferring data you don't need. You'll also want to defragment your disk drive.

Transfer the data
Now I'll run through the upgrade on my ThinkPad. You may have slightly different experiences if you have a different laptop or use different connectors and software, but this will give you the general idea.

Take the new drive and mount it carefully in the case. Be very careful with hard drives. They can't take any banging around or squeezing. There's delicate machinery in there