"I have a nice new hard drive sitting them but putting off installing it as it means everything needs to be reformatted if I do....and all my stuff transferred... "

If all you're doing is replacing an existing system drive with a newer/larger one, you can bypass most of this pain by cloning it, O/S and all. You wind up with a bootable hard drive with all your data and apps ready to go. This is easily accomplished with freeware and saves a lot of aggravation.

Someone mentioned that the other day here and my ears pricked...sounds like a good plan...will have to get my tech department (aka teenage son) onto it.