A new hard drive is one of the simplest and best upgrades you can perform on your hard drive. It increases storage capacity, can noticeably speed up system performance and extend the useful life your machine. Today we'll show you what drive to pick, how to install it and the best way to clone all that data from your old drive so you can boot from new hard disk, Mac or Windows, without requiring you to re-install any of your old software.

We demoed this on a pair of notebooks, but the basic software and techniques will work on desktops, too!

for more info on the software we used check out Disk Copy for PC users. If you want a more open source solution check out FOG and Clonezilla. If you want the comfort of off the shelf tools check out Norton's Ghost and Acronis True Image.

For OS X users the best solutions are the freeCarbon Copy Cloner and trial ware but free to useSuperDuper!.