Upgrading a Laptop

Looking to buy the wife a laptop for her birthday and i'm just having a hunt around Dell as i'll probably get it from there.

One thing though is the standard HDD is 250gig, and i'm just wondering if it will be enough. If a year down the road i need it bigger, can you simply buy a new hdd or what. I've heard laptops arent really meant to be upgraded but i wasnt sure if that applies to everything or just certain aspects.

Shes just going to be using it mostly for surfing and typing so its not like it needs to be top of the range, but i also dont want to buy it and its in the scrap heap in a years time.

Should be able to buy a new one and plonk it in there. Tbh though, if you're getting it from Dell then it's much easier and cheaper to just upgrade it on their website when choosing the laptop. Will she really need anything more than 250GB though, just for using the internet and word documents?

you would have to copy the drive onto the new one as it'll have you OS on it. personally if you really did need any extra space just buy an extrenal hard drive you can pick 500Gb for £60ish and thats a matter of plug in and use, no messing about.

Probably not Nicky, though i'm just double checking just in case.

Cheers for the replies.

Its no more difficult than chaning a HDD in a desktop, just be wary that cheap large laptop HDD's do not last. The heat wears them out quickly, unfortunately with laptop parts if you want quality you really have to pay for it unlike PC bits which by and large are all in the same ballpark.

I upgraded my laptop's HDD to a larger capacity and faster 7200rpm model, it was a piece of cake. I'd stick with the 250gb drive for now, with a swap down the line being possible in the unlikely case that disk space becomes an issue.