Description

Today's application software packages are becoming more graphics intensive and thus, are consuming more space on your hard drive. You never seem to have enough hard drive space on your notebook computer. If you've had a computer for any length of time, you've probably seen the message "Disk Full Error," or a similar message. It doesn't take long to fill-up a hard drive with the new installation CD-ROMs containing thousands of fonts and with the avalanche of data from the internet.

Even if you haven't yet seen the dreaded "Disk Full" message, you'll need some open space on your hard drive for the Windows swap files and disk caching software. If your disk doesn't have some large sections of empty space it will have to work extra hard to store all of that temporary virtual memory data. Overworking your hard drive will reduce its life and slow down your computer's performance. At a minimum, you should have 100 megabytes of free space.

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Ways to Increase Your Notebook's Hard Drive Space

Purchase and Install an External Hard Drive Solution

There are many external hard drive solutions. Iomega's Zip, Iomega's Jazz,  are  the best known names. XtraDisk offers the USB Drives,   FireWire Drives or NoteDrives as simple, low-cost, high-capacity solution. The advantage of an external drive, is that it provides a quick solution to increasing your storage capacity. It also has the advantage of working with your desktop computer or next notebook purchase. The disadvantage is that it is still not as convenient as having a single internal large hard drive.

 

LTG offers bare internal hard drives for notebooks and upgrade kits for transferring data from your old hard drive to the new hard drive. Most removable notebook hard drives require a unique mounting caddy that holds the hard drive in the specific notebook. Some kits come with the caddy, some have you mount the new hard drive in the original caddy. All of the kits require that you have some mechanical/technical skills. Most of the newer high-capacity drives (2.1GB and higher) have mounting screw holes in different locations from the older drives - making it difficult to mount the drives into the original brackets without drilling new holes or using tape to secure the drive.

In addition to the physical mounting of the hard drive, you are faced with how to transfer your data from the old drive to the new drive. XtraDisk Data Transfer kits come with an external PCMCIA hard drive interface and "clone" software to facilitate the data transfer. 

Besides the data transfer issue, many of the notebook computers (e.g. Compaq) come with special partitions on the original hard drive. These partitions are used for diagnostic purposes or as a "save-to-disk" or suspend storage area. It is important to create these partitions on the new hard drive for your system to work correctly.

Some important questions to ask yourself before you purchase the an internal drive and become "upgrade technician for the day" are:

• Do I really have the technical skills and knowledge to perform the upgrade?
• How am I going to handle data transfer?
• Will the mounting screw holes on the new drive work with my bracket?
• Is it cost effective for me to do it myself.

 

Having someone upgrade your notebook hard drive for you has the advantage of a guarantee that the job will be done correctly and that everything works properly before you pay for the service. You also have the confidence that the work is being performed by a qualified technician that has performed many hard drive upgrades. The disadvantage of having someone else upgrade your hard drive is the "down-time" without the use of your notebook.

To minimize the down-time, LTG now offers a 2-3 Day Upgrade Service or 5-6 Day Upgrade Service (see below).

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Upgrade Services We Provide

At LTG Technology we believe in providing a total hard drive upgrade solution at a fixed price. Each of our hard drive upgrades include the following services:

• Basic System Check
• File/Data Check on Existing Hard Drive
• BIOS Upgrade (if necessary and available)
• Partition Setup on New Drive (including diagnostics, suspend, etc.)
• File/Data Transfer from Old Drive to New Drive
• Removal of Old Drive & Installation of New Drive
• Hard Drive Burn-in & Testing
• Notebook Packaged & Shipped Back

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Our Pricing

* Prices include complete upgrade with all shipping costs

*2-3 Day Service: You ship your notebook to us UPS Next Day Air.  We receive it the next day & upgrade within 24hours, hopefully the same day, & return ship it to you UPS Next Day Air.  If you ship it to us on Monday, you receive it back on Wednesday or Thursday.

*5-6 Day Service:  Same as above except your notebook is shipped UPS 2nd Day Air both ways.

 Prices effective as of 10/24/05

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How to Get Your Hard Drive Upgraded

E-Mail Us for an Appointment

Although we aren't that formal, it helps to know what kind of notebook is coming in for upgrade and what size hard drive you want. Please include the manufacturer, the model, current size of your hard drive, operating system, your name, e-mail address, and a phone number where we can call you.

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