how do you change your hard drive keeping the memory?

Question

My computer is running on very low memory, so I bought a new hard drive for it. Can anyone tell me how I can install the new one without loosing my memory?

Answer 1

If you are referring to your RAM memory the hard drive has nothing to do with that. If your new hard drive is blank, there should be a sector on it that you use to set it up and then you will have to load your OS and other programs over onto it. If you got one that is preloaded with the OS, then just plug it in and you should be be ale to just have to put whatever application programs you had before onto it.

Ron

Answer 2

Ok I think you're confusing yourself on terms and two differnt things.

Memory is typically referring to your Physical Memory or your RAM.

Hard Drives are used for storage space. But, at times, Windows will take a chunk of hard drive space and convert it into it's own little space to use as memory, even though this is slow.

Whenever you are running slow, and want to upgrade, your first and best choice are always to add RAM.

Now if you are asking how to install a 2nd hard drive without losing your original hard drive? That is easy enough to do, just have them both plugged in, and change the Jumper(the little bitty plastic with 2 holes, on the back of the harddrive on 6 pins, to make the original MASTER and the New on SLAVE. The directions on how to do this should be on your Harddrives.

I hope this was helpful.

Answer 3

Memory is separate from hard drives. If you don't want to loose your information you have on your drive you can hook up your old hard drive as a slave drive, there's jumpers on the back of the drive and on the drive label it should tell you how to set it up. Oh and you might want to change your virtual memory settings (virtual memory is old hard drive space that the computer uses to swap information back and forth from the physical memory chips, also called a swap file).

Answer 4

Ideally you should have at LEAST 512 MB RAM (memory) and a hard drive with a write speed of at LEAST 7,000 rpm.

If your computer is "running on very low memory" it sounds as if you needed to upgrade the RAM (memory) not the hard drive.

Answer 5

I assume you mean you're running low on disk space...

I have not installed a hard drive on a system with the newer sata connections, but they probably have a jumper setting on them to set them as the slave drive (see documentation with your hard drive).

If it's an ide hard drive, they will have the jumpers.

Connect the sata or ide cable to the new hard drive, connect power to the drive and you should be ready to go.

Right click on my computer (for XP), click manage, go to disk management & you can format the drive.

Once you do that, you can move files to the new hard drive.

Good luck