Today, I am preparing my work laptop for an upgrade to Windows 7. I've backed up the device manager information - in Windows Vista you can export devices and driver information by opening the run dialogue > then type in 'msinfo32' - this brings up a system information box and then you can use file > export to save your computer config to a text file. A bit easier than using screen grab on the device manager screen then pasting it into a gif file. Why there is no option to print out your device manager I dont know, i think there might have been an option to print in windows XP, but thats no longer in Vista.

Anway, now trying to download all the windows 7 drivers. Complicated slightly by the fact that Alienware were bought out by Dell so there are no drivers on the .co.uk site for windows 7 (there are some on the .com site, but not for my laptop). There are drivers on Dell for the M17x, but I have the earlier M17 version so cannot use the newest drivers there either. I managed  to eventually find a page on the UK alienware support forum which links to Windows 7 drivers for alienware M17 laptop but you need to get a 'hive' account for downloading some of the extra software required. I've tried registering for a hive account, without success (the account number does not seem to be recognised anymore - probably due to the new account numbers having to conform to Dell's syntax) so I've emailed tech support.

On the plus side, the new secondary HD that I installed was set up without any problems at all. I needed to go into control panel > administrative tools > computer management > storage > disk management just to initialise the disk and give it a drive letter. Not the most user friendly way of adding a HD. It took over an hour to format the new drive because it's half a terabyte. Should last me a good while.

Anyway, just copying all user data, websites, email database and project info across to the new HD, then going to do a full format and windows 7 install on the smaller primary HD. All data has already been backed up to an external HD and also email data and settings backed up to DVDs. Can't have too many backups.