OK... I'm really, really new... Hard Drive

[Stokes]

Hey Guys,
I'm about as green as it gets.. spending all my energy on the learning curve to buy my MacBook. Well, on Sunday, I bought the MacBook, the very basic one with 1GB RAM and the small hard drive. I bought it at a retail location, but did buy the Microsoft Office for Mac deal on Black Friday, so it should be here soon. I've not even turned my new machine on yet.....

So, in the mean time, I made a deal with a fellow, and he had a MacBook Pro that he just bought. It came with 2GB Ram and the 160Gig HD. He is upgrading, and I'm getting his old stuff (which he says he has less than 30 minutes of use on). I want to use his stuff to upgrade my machine.

I'm pretty sure I get the whole RAM upgrade.. pretty straight forward.

And, I think I understand the mechanics of doing the HD, but how do I transfer the software portion over? Do I just use the discs that my machine came with? Should I copy anything from my machine with it's current disc into a thumbdrive or anything before I switch HDs out? I'd really like to keep my old HD as a spare, in case of an emergency... just the way it is now, without adding any more crap to it, so I could swap it out in a hurry and be back to square one if I needed.

Thanks for any insights!

 

[Matek]

Err, simply swaping the drives COULD work, but I would do a clean install just to make sure. Since you don't have anything setup on your machine yet, there is no need to perform any preference backups. Simply put the MBP hard drive in your MB and use the discs you got with the laptop to install a fresh copy of OS X.

 

[eman]

What's he charging for these items? You may be better off finding these items on your own. The HDD you need is a 2.5" SATA hard drive and you can find used ones on Ebay or Craigslist.

 

[Stokes]

I'm doing a trade where we are basically valuing our items at about $75....

I think I'll actually be about about $40 in cash, but it was from buying my trade goods at a fantastic price.