Hi,
The motherboard in my Accer Aspire 5100 died so I'm probably going to buy an Accer Aspire 3050 because of the cost. My 5100 has a 120 Gig harddrive while the new 3050 only has 60 Gig.

Question is: will my 120 fit in the 3050? The Computer store told me "No because the 5100 hard drive has an IDE connection, where as the Aspire 3050 Hard drive has a SATA connection"; and I'm not sure I believe him.
Thanks in advance.

IDE will not fit into SATA thats for sure, but chances are the new computer has an IDE connection where you could put the harddrive. I would have to look up the motherboard specs to confirm this though.

In any case...you could always just buy an enclosure and connect your old drive via USB, having access to more storage and all your old files easily.

Of course, you need to buy an enclosure accommodating 2.5-inch IDE drives...there are a ton of them.

The problems with moving a boot drive from one system to another (as a boot drive)...still remain, whether laptop or desktop, so I would not recommend your original inclination.

Chances are that's an OEM version of Windows installed, which is not moveable legally to a different system.

Louis

Sounds good, thanks for the honest info; much appreciated.

Easily done .

Louis

The problem that hamluis was referring to with moving the hdd from one computer to another is important. Each motherboard has a chipset which has its own plug-n-play IDs which the registry recognizes. When you take a hdd with Windows installed from one computer and install it in another the registry will see the IDs of the new chipset and become confused. This usually will render the OS inoperable and require a clean installation.

www.newegg.com carries a brand of enclosure called Masscool that will work with IDE or SATA laptop drives. That comes in handy for me