New HDD

[#1]

Hi
I'd like to get my daughter a bigger HDD for her Compaq S3150UK. Its full at 40GB. She has all her music and pictures etc on a separate external  HDD. I thought running applications especially her favourite Sims2 from the external HDD would be a problem so the 40GB is mailnly applications.
Anyway; if I get a new internal HDD for her how do I know which one to get in terms of the interface and spec. Can aynyone give me a brief guide as it seems rather complicated.. I'm also a little concerned as the orginal HDD has all the recovery files to reinstall the os etc. I have gto a set of CDs but they are now 5 years old and I'm concerned they may not work
Advice would be really really welcome.

[#2]

have a look at this page How to do It

[#3]

Yes i Saw that.
It rather unhelpfully says
Make sure the motherboard in the PC can support the type of drive that you want to install. The most compatible drives are IDE, followed by Utra-IDE (EIDE), and then Serial ATA (SATA).
So how do you do that then?

[#4]

http://hp.icecat.biz/en/p/DF135A/Compaq%2520Presario%2520S3150UK.htm appears to describe the technical details of your PC.
Note that your disk drive is only 5400rpm - which is OK for archiving data, but not for a main system disk.
You could always open the box, look at the disk model number to find out what type it is, via google.
It's worth looking at the cables connecting the disk - a thinnish round cable indicates SATA whilst a wide flat connector probably indicates some kind of IDE interface.

[#5]

At that age you could guarantee its a ide drive. So you will need a new ide drive and then you will need to copy the old drive to the new one with Ghost or Acronis so you get all the files etc. once you have copied the drive you can remove the old drive.
Judging by you post I wonder if you are capable of installing a new drive. The problem is the pc is so old at 5 years that its worth £10-20 so the new drive would be worth more than the pc. You are also buying an old drive and most new systems come with Sata so it is not an upgrade

[#6]

You can check what the drive model is via Device Manager, then Google to see if it's IDE (PATA) or SATA, but as Samurai says it's almost bound to be IDE.
Just adding a second drive is probably easier all round. 40GB is plenty for programs etc. and most Compaq sytems have space for another and often helpfully have all the spare mounting screws etc inside the case. You can get 160GB for under £30 these days.
Ask someone knowledgeable to have a quick look inside to check for mounting and cabling.

[#7]

Confirmed beyond reasonable doubt it is IDE. I guess this is the classic case of not knowing when to cut our losses.
Over the last 18 months I've put in a new graphics card; upped the RAM to around 1.5GB as well as I bought an external HDD (though this is useful to our other machines). So the question  I need to think about is - is it worth another £30-40 on a new internal hard drive only to find out that say the processor is not up to the job or as Samurai has pointed may be I lack the skill to install it anyway.
I think we will limp on for a bit longer, something will fail and then we can go shopping if there are enough pennies.....
Thanks for the advice

[#8]

You have a fairly fast machine with a large memory - and a slow, full disk.
Why not have a look on ebay for another IDE drive?
I've got a 600Mhz, 384MByte PC - circa 2000AD
It has 3 IDE drives of varying speeds and a DVD writer.
I put a SCSI card in it  and ran a cable to a 10,000 rpm 38GByte drive in an external box.
All courtesy of ebay.
Your PC is much faster than my old PC - I would go for one more upgrade.

[#9]

I'm running Vista (Business, with Aero) happily on a test PC with a similar processor and memory (only 10% faster) so I'd say keep it running as it's fine for XP for a few years yet!

[#10]

Thanks Guys got one from PC World this very afternoon for £28 (80GB) Happily adding all my daughter's  stuff to it as we speak.
Hope my daughter gets to see some improvement in performance.
To be honest at 15 she should be doing this herself.