Question: Upgrading harddrive

I am Windows user for last 14 years. I am thinking to get myself a Macbook Pro 13 inch and make the switch. I have question on upgrading the harddrive.

I want to upgrade the hard drive to 500Gb 7200 rpm. Was wondering has anyone done that since the release of new macbook pro 3 weeks ago? Any suggestions?

And important question. Can I use the recovery disk that comes with the Macbook to install fresh copy of OS X on new harddrive? Any things I should be worried about?

has anyone noticed any problems in this upgrade?

Thanks a lot.

Regarding your question about upgrading the hard drive: Read through this thread posted on another Mac forum = Link

As far as recovering the operating system to the new hard drive, yes, you can use the recovery DVD, but the easiest way is to clone the old hard drive to the new one. Both of the utilities below are designed for cloning:

SuperDuper (shareware)

Carbon Copy Cloner (donation ware)

Regards.

Thanks a lot.

So ... as per your recommendation ... I should clone my harddrive. Approximately how much space I will need to backup entire HDD of the brand new machine (no data). I am asking this because I was wondering if I can clone the data on DVD or a jump drive.

Again going back to recovery disk ... will it have everything a brand new machine comes with in the beginning or just the operating system? (I am trying to figure out WHY cloning is an easier option in my case)

Space required? As long as the amount of data plus the operating system does not exceed the size of your backup media, you should be OK.

Cloning is not only easier and faster with the two programs I mentioned, but in the long run more convenient. Here's why:

In order to use the Time Machine backup you need an internal or external drive formatted to HFS+. Flash drives, thumb drives, and DVD media will not work with Time Machine. With that in mind, when you clone your original drive to the new one, the new drive is ready to go. Just install it. The old drive can then be wiped and used as a backup drive (placed in a USB external carrier).

Your Leopard recovery disk will have everything (OS X plus applications) less any data. You can certainly use just that if you have no data on your old drive that you need to preserve. But then, what are you going to do with the drive that you removed?

Both programs I recommended will not clone to DVD media or a flash drive. They will only clone to an internal or external hard drive formatted to HFS +.

Regards.