Laptop hard drives tend to be on the smallish side, so they can fill up fast. But swapping your laptop's internal drive for a higher capacity replacement is easier than you may think.

With some online comparison shopping, you can find a 160GB SATA drive for around Rs. 3000 or a 320GB drive for about Rs. 4,000. A nOO-rpm drive will give you optimal performance.

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Next, get an external USB drive enclosure with an internal interface matching that of your hard drive. This should cost no more than Rs.500. Install the new drive in the enclosure, connect the enclosure to your system, and then format the drive according to the manufacturer's instructions.

Finally, use a free utility such as DriveImage XML to copy the contents of the old drive to the new one, and then swap the two drives. (TIp: Reuse the old one for storage.)