swapping HD ?s

[blk03MitsuES]

helping out a friend who wants to put a faster HD and more ram on old system to be able to browse the net painlessly. He's using xp pro on a system he bought back in 2000. he's current HD is 5400 rpms and wants to upgrade to atleast 7200. has 2x 256mb of ram and will upgrade to 2x 512mb.

so how do i go about transferring all of his stuff from old HD to new HD? btw from another thread i saw http://www.acronis.co.uk as a way to copy the HD to another one. but that just raised more questions.

first of all, is he better off making a brand new installion of xp and simply transferring his files(text,pics,mp3s)? that's what i would suggest but he doesn't have all the cd's for all the programs he's got.

if i use acronis software, i would need 2 HDs? i transfer from old to temporary, then from the temporary to the new hd?

thanks guys

[Spawn-Inc]

disk wizard (http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=DiscWizard&vgnextoid=d9fd4a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD ) works for me and its made by that company you listed.

i never copied 1 xp install to a blank drive but i did make a ghost image of my main xp install and later was able to restore it like nothing changed.

[BuzzKillington]

I used Norton Ghost a while back and it was pretty straight forward.

May I ask why he only wants to upgrade to 2x512's? Nowadays RAM is pretty cheap. He'll be kicking himself in the head if he skimps on 4 or 5 dollars for half of the RAM.