Though I often work on and even build desktop computers, I haven’t had much occasion to work on laptops, even though I own three of them.

Once, about a year ago and with great trepidation, I replaced a motherboard on my Toshiba Portégé and was nothing short of ecstatic when I pulled it off.

Thus I wasn’t as hesitant to upgrade the hard drive on my best laptop, my Toshiba Satellite 6100 Pro, feeling that it would be a straightforward proposition. It wasn’t, but things rarely are, especially with laptops.

I may need to save humongous audio and video files next year — I’ve recently purchased a bunch of supplementary audio and video recording equipment for my new podcasting and video enterprises at New Tech High — so I knew I needed to upgrade my current 40-gigabyte drive.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a 120-gigabyte hard drive that would fit my Satellite — I used my usual technique of shopping online with Google’s Froogle shopping search — and doubly pleased that it cost only $116.

After acquiring the drive, my next step was to figure out how to copy the files from the old drive to the new one. That’s no slam dunk. With a desktop computer, we can install the new hard drive in “slave” mode and do a direct disk copy using the software that comes with the disk. Since laptops can have only one hard drive installed at a time, I had to come up with a novel solution.

When one didn’t pop up out of the living-room rug, I went online and very quickly realized there was only one way to solve the dilemma: I’d need to find a way to connect my new drive to my laptop externally.

In my search for “upgrading laptop hard drive” one enterprising gentleman had posted a Web page explaining that he’d bought a USB 2.5” hard-drive enclosure. I immediately hit Froogle and found one compatible with my 44-pin interface for $12 including shipping. It reached my mailbox in three days.

Sure enough, it was easy to assemble. I plugged it in and my Windows Vista operating system found it right away.

By the way, the enclosure wasn’t the only thing I needed. While I was waiting for the enclosure to arrive, I busied myself locating a hard drive backup program.

As it happened, I already had the perfect program, Norton Ghost, which specializes in “cloning” hard drives. Unfortunately, it’s not compatible with Windows Vista, and Symantec Corporation hasn’t crafted a patch yet.

I decided to go the shareware route, so I headed to C|net’s Download.com where I searched using “copy hard drive vista” for my keywords.

Near the top of the list was Paragon Drive Backup 8.5, which sounded like just what I needed. Plus, it was Vista-compatible.

Paragon Drive Backup fortunately had easy-to-understand documentation, with some pretty clear Help files. In any event, I clicked on the “Copy Hard Disk” button, which launched the “Copy Hard Disk Wizard.” I followed the recommended settings.

Seven hours later — copying gigs and gigs of data takes time — I had my perfect copy. I opened my laptop hard-drive cover and swapped my old for my new, which I removed from its enclosure. I fired it up, and it worked. That wasn’t so bad, was it?