Replace Dell Inspiron Hard Disk

hi,
i need advice on my old Dell Inspiron 9400 hard because I want to change my WD 160 Gb, 5400 rpm has 4k in areas bad beginning to give me some errors when running chkdsk (ELIMINATIONS items indexes etc. but never a bug in the file system).

Occasionally (a couple of times over 4 months) there were errors that prevented the normal boot, but with a couple of reboots usually the problem was resolved and diagnostic programs on hidden partition confirmed that the problems are precisely localized.

Forgive me if it does not carry over in detail the errors that occur to me but I have not noted yet.

In this regard I would like to know:

1) I checked and I have no disk of the PC, I recommend to create one or because I want to change the disc would be useless?

2) is feasible to create an image of my entire drive on an external drive and then "transfer" on the new disk (including partitions) so that you do not have to format the disk from scratch losing programs, profiles, etc. in XP and diagnostic programs Dell?which program do you recommend?

3) I might have trouble in terms of heat-feed if I decided to mount a disk to 7200 rpm instead of 5400?


Thank you.

1) Yes, better to create it.Not only for the new hard disk but also to have a copy of the operating system preinstalled.
2) Yes, you can use the usual software for the creation and management of images such as Acronis or Paragon.
3) If you take a model of quality you should have no problems, but we must also see the size of the chassis (for example if you have a 12-inch model may not advise you to be a 7200 rpm hd, better one from 5400 or, if you have not problems of money, an SSD).

You should have some software provided by Dell to create the disks, although usually gives them directly to CD / DVD do not leave it to you.

I like Western Digital drives are not bad (especially if you've driven the Scorpio Black, definitely better than the Scorpio Blue), but also advice you to see the Samsung, which usually are less noisy and very little heat.
Seagate and Hitachi have several interesting solutions, but similar to WD.