Laptop-drive jive.(COMPUTER CURES)

I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop about 18 months old that came with Windows Media Center. Can I remove the hard drive, replace it with a brand-new, larger hard drive, and install Windows Vista, assuming I have a full-retail copy of the Vista OS?

JIM HEINER, VIA E-MAIL

In theory, you should be able to do this--but caveats abound. A laptop, like any desktop, will have an IDE or a Serial ATA (SATA) boot drive; you'll need to know which you have before buying a replacement. Check with the notebook maker, or run CPUID's free PC Wizard 2008 (available at computershopper.com/downloads) for a report on the specifications of your laptop's current drive.

I would contact the laptop maker's support center, regardless, to ask whether the laptop's BIOS has any known limitations in terms of hard drive capacity. An older laptop with a 20GB hard drive might not support, say, a 400GB drive due to BIOS strictures.

Once you know the physical interface of your drive, recognize that virtually all laptops employ 2.5-inch form-factor drives (usually termed "laptop drives" by sellers), as opposed to the cheaper-per-gigabyte 3.5-inch models that desktop PCs use. (A few ultralight notebooks employ supersmall 1.8-inch drives.) The highest-capacity 2.5-inch drives currently hold 400GB (with 500GB models imminent), as opposed to the 1-terabyte storage of the roomiest desktop models.

Although all 2.5-inch drives are the same width, their ...