Hello,
I have a Dell Inspiron 17R laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit that I have had for about three years. I've been coping with a failing hard drive for 4ish months now. It started out failing SMART tests and turned up with a bunch of bad sectors. It randomly freezes up and crashes(mostly when saving large files to the hard drive and this is getting more frequent and it crashes every time the SMART test tries to run). So I plan to replace it because other than that, it's been a great computer(and I can't afford a new one). But I have had other glitches with the system such as problems with corrupted files and the desktop icons(I arrange them the way I like and then next time I restart my computer they get strewn all over the desktop(most annoying thing in the world)). New computers always seem really fast because the system is not bogged down with all kinds of junk. So my question is: can I put a new hard drive in and start over with a new, clean copy of Windows 7 instead of cloning the old drive? After I get the new Windows up and running I will move all my pictures and videos over and then re-install all my programs. I would also like to add that my computer DID NOT come with recovery disks or anything like that. However I did make a system repair disk. But I'm guessing that doesn't contain the whole Windows operating system. The product key sticker is still on the bottom of the computer so can I just use that to download a new copy of Windows 7? Or is there a way to ONLY copy the windows operating system off the old drive(I'm guessing not because some might be corrupted and if my computer has any virus those would get copied too)?
Thank you so much in advance! :)
-Joachim