Well by the sound of things my hard drive sounds like it's going to die anyday now, & having never replaced a hard drive before, my questions is... Will I have to reinstall Windows? (I wanna know this before my local Best Buy gets rid of their Windows XP stock). Also is there anything else I need to know.
if you're looking to replace, you will have to reinstall windows and everything else Though if you set it up as a secondary drive, I don't think you will have to reinstall. I don't know, I let my brother handle all that stuff
If it's your primary yes. You could probably make an image and install everything that way, but a reinstall is generally good for you. Also, you should be able to reuse your XP key as long as it's on a single PC.
You can make a ghost image or something and just copy the image over...but that is a long process. I advise you just reinstall...winblows needs a clean install every 12 months or so. If you have not settled on a drive yet, I suggest Western Digital enterprise drives (5 year warranty with a special tech support line for enterprise products only, VERY VERY good tech support, second to none in HD companies) or Seagate.
What the fuck are you people doing to your computers? I've been able to run numerous years on the same Windows installation without problems! Multiple times!
People accumulate spyware, install a bunch of programs they don't need, fail to defragment when needed...
Oh, I don't know, I use winblows, which leaves shit in the registry when programs are "removed"... I've run XP for long periods of time, but it slowly dies.
Ok another quick question, I found a hard drive but now it says I need SATA connectors, What are SATA connectors & what do they look like? Also my computer is store bought, it's an eMachines, will that cause any problems or can I mod it like any custom-built computer?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA I'm not sure if your PC's mobo has sata ports by default (depends on the age really). If it doesn't you can always buy a PCI card with sata ports.
