Upgrading & Fixing Laptops DUMmIES

they are specifically designed for use with laptops (very few desktop PCs

even have a PC Card slot) and they use the same tiny, low-powered hard

drives employed for internal drives.

A class of do-it-yourself upgrades are meant to be used to hold the original

hard drive of a laptop after it has been swapped out of its bay in an upgrade.

One example, the EZ-Gig kit sold by Bix Computers at http://www.bixnet.comis

shown in Figure 7-6. The kit includes a replacement hard drive, a small plastic

case to hold the original drive, and a PC Card and cable. You can format the

new drive and add an operating system and applications, or you can use the

supplied Clone-EZ software to transfer the contents of the original drive to

the new, larger drive before it is installed within the laptop.

New hard drive

Cable PC Card

External housing

Figure 7-6:
The com-
ponents of
an EZ-Gig
kit, include a
new laptop
hard drive, a
case for the
original
drive, plus
connecting
cable and
PC Card
interface.

Chapter 7: Easing In to Hard Disks 137