There is one thing called jumper on the hard drive, you need to change its location from Master to Slave if you have the Master, if not live it as master. This is not needed when installing SATA drives.

It is not important if its IDE or SATA drive, the process of installing it is completely the same. You will get some cables that are used to connect the drive to your motherboard, just try to secure a safe place in your tower for the new drive. Also try to avoid touching other cables, circuits and panels in your computer tower. First connect data cable and after that you can connect the power.

Watch when installing because hard drives are really sensitive piece of hardware.

After that you should turn on computer and enter BIOS immediately to check if it recognizes the drive, sometimes it recognizes it automatically, sometimes you need to change some options in order to make BIOS know the component is there.

Now you should know that drives are low formatted when you get them, so you should do “high level format” before using it. You could just boot for example XP and go to “my computer” to find a new drive located in that folder. Then select the new drive, right click on it, go to tools and select Format. It will ask you to choose the file system and you should choose NTFS system, click start after that and be patient. This operation can last long, especially with large capacity drives, but leave computer working until this operation is finished.

Once it is completed you can reboot your personal computer and then find the new drive. Adding a new drive may change letters for other drives, so don’t be confused with it.  This is what needs to be done, but you can never know what can go wrong with computers.

If your computer’s system still uses FAT32 you may have problems with bigger capacity drives like 120Gb drive or a larger, the system sometimes can’t recognize them. Service Pack 2 could solve this problem, or you can update your BIOS if you have some really old motherboard. You can also turn off your computer, check cables again just to make sure everything is connected as it should be. After that reboot, go to BIOS to see if the device is recognized now, you may even need the boot disk for your system or you can download it too, it is needed to format this new drive before it can be installed as a slave drive of your original Master drive.

If this does not help try calling some computer repair service or computer repair on site service that can look at the problem and fix it in no time. You can try to fix problem yourself but it is always advised to contact some help and support and see what is the best thing to do when a problem occurs.

Unlike Windows Vista that has a great layout and visual quality, Windows 7 will be more compatible, it will support all previous software that worked on past versions of Windows and it will be an a lot faster and better operating system.

Windows 7 will bring some major updates to some Windows features. For example advances in handwriting recognition, better performance with multi-core processors, kernel upgrades, support for virtual hard drives, better boot performance, etc. Many new features will be added to the control panel, so you will be able to customize your operating system even more then you could before. The taskbar will be changed to, the quick launch icon has been removed and replaced with pinning programs and applications to the taskbar. The new task bar is easier and more practical, but maybe you will need some time to get used to it. The new layout has some practical features and it can make some of your Windows transparent just by dragging your mouse over the icon, which can be really helpful in some situations.

Microsoft has published information on minimum system requirements needed to use Windows 7. Microsoft has released an application that works as an advisor, it scans your computer to see if it is compatible for Windows 7.

For 32 bit system minimum system requirements for Windows 7 are following: 1 GB of RAM, Processor should be minimum 1 GHz, graphic card should support direct x 9 and it should have at least 128 MB of graphics memory, it requires 16 GB of hard disk space. For 64 bit things are different: At least 2 GB of RAM, processor 1 GHz, Graphic card that supports direct x 9 with 128 MB of graphics memory and at least 20 GB of free hard disk space is required for installation.

Some features that Windows Vista had are removed in order to maximize the performance. Your computer should work really fine when using Windows 7 because the main goal when making Windows 7 was to fix the previous problems and make it stable and reliable. Layout for Windows 7 looks great and it looks like they have really paid attention to making it functional and user friendly rather than putting make up on something that doesn’t work but looks nice. This is the idea most people had that used Vista.

Your computer will certainly work great when using Windows 7 if it has the minimum system requirements, but it is always better to have computer that does not only mach minimum operating requirements but is even better configured. Windows 7 will run smoothly even on computers that are outdated, it is only needed to have requirements earlier mentioned in the text. It looks like Microsoft is finally making something as good as Windows XP, maybe even better.