Ahhh...spring is in the air. And I was getting a bit low on my 160GB HD.

Not only that, but I was getting odd Vista behavior, including being unable to access TripAdvisor no matter what I did. (Why that website and that website only, I have no idea.)

So, I ponied up $170 for a new 7200rpm 200GB SATA drive. Yes, I know, only 40GB more, but it'll do for now.

Plus, I got restore disks free from Lenovo and so today I re-started the ThinkPad T60p from scratch. From the restore disks.

So far so good. TripAdvisor is back. Now to download 42 Vista updates, get antivirus and antispam configured, then clean off all the Lenovo bloatware, then get Office 2007 up, then install all my other programs....

I guess we're stuck doing this about once a year.

Question for you: when you restore from the disks, do you then have to run through all the recent Windows updates?

I have an X40, about 2.5 years old. Want to restore the hard drive (I have the disks), but I'm wondering how long it's gonna take to get my Windows installation current.

Does that make sense?

Yes you do.

I upgraded my X60 to a 200GB drive a couple of months back and had to go through the process. It's not only the Windows Updates you need to consider, but also Office etc.

Take a Ghost image of the drive once you get everything installed. Easy way would be to put the 160GB drive in a USB enclosure, boot off a CD with Ghost.exe on it and dump the image to the 160GB drive.

That way you have a clean backup, even if you don't use it, sometimes a new drive can just die during the first month/two of burn in.

Rescue and Recovery backup is a good option to keep, as you can schedule backups to a USB/Network drive automatically.

Enjoy the 200GB drive, if its the Hitachi HTS7220, like mine, you find it very fast and uses less power than most other slower drives.

Will do, once I get Office installed, other apps installed, then shrink the primary partition down so I can add partitions for data, music and video.

It is and so far I think it's doing quite well. No noise issues either; very quiet.

You do. Total time from installing the new drive to having a complete, initial Vista screen up (after re-loading fingerprints, Lenovo updates and Vista updates) was about 4 hours. Another couple of hours to load Office and other software.

Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't a 7200rpm drive use more power than a 5400rpm one?

The Hitachi HTS7220 drive uses less power believe it or not.

When I got my IBM X60 it had an 80GB SATA drive, which was not big enough and my 160GB IDE would not fit, so I spent many hours reading the Thinkpad Forums and given the specs of the drive and reported by other users, it uses less power.

At the time, I also looked at the 250GB (5400) and 300GB (4200) drives, but thought for the speed of 7200 and 200GB, I would stay with the speed over size option.

IBM X60, 7-8 Hours battery life with the 8 cell, weighs next to nothing, I'm not complaining. Best notebook I've ever bought.

Pic of it at work, when I did a meet at a Hilton

Thanks for the info, Asuka and DenverBrian.

Those 7k200 Travelstars are a gem. I just upgraded from a 80GB 5400rpm to the same 200GB 7200rpm drive. (Extracted from an external drive on sale this week at Best Buy for $119.99, but that's another story.)

Out of curiosity, I grabbed the data sheets from both from HGST. The units are Watts, average.

The 7200rpm drive does draw slightly more power than the 5400rpm. The difference is about 10% to 30% more, but 0.5W is really negligible in the big picture. My T60 on battery idling with power savings turned up to the max still consumes 11W.