- Cloning your hard drive involves copying the contents of the old hard drive so that you can transfer it over to your new hard drive.

- The main reason for upgrading hard drives is to increase capacity.

- If you like your computer exactly how it is and simply want more space, you'll want to clone your hard drive.

- Alternately, you may want to start fresh because your computer has become bogged down by excess data or registry information.

- Installing your OS fresh can often speed up your machine but the downside is that you'll have to customize your machine again and reinstall programs and files.

- The first step to this is getting the appropriate software ready. We'll be using Acronis True Image HD to copy our drive.

- The next step is to get the hard drive and place it into a dock and then connect it to the computer. Now we can copy from one to the other.

- Fire up the software and run through the steps, following the instructions.

- There are many software options available for this procedure. The Mac has Time Machine, for example.

- If you're already using Time Machine to back up to an external hard drive then that hard drive should be ready to swap into your notebook.