Tech Support Guy is a good resource with a lot of helpful and knowledgeable people. I spent a fair amount of time there before and after my hard drive crash. They were the ones who turned me on to the idea of cloning my old drive to my new one.

I had the new drive bought and was within a day or two of installing it (and trying the cloning thing) when the old one forced my hand by quitting completely. I spent a panicky evening setting up and formatting the drive and installing Windows to it, then almost a week getting all my software reinstalled and working. I was online a good deal (from my "lifeboat" computer, as I called it) getting advice from the TSG people. A few of the things I learned in the process:

-- Take copious notes on everything you do, especially if it's something you've never done before. I already knew to do this. Note what messages and options you see on the screen, what choices you enter, and what the results are.

-- You'll probably need some kind of startup disk, either CD or floppy, to start your computer without your old hard drive. If you opt for a CD, make sure your computer can be set to boot from the CD drive. Mine had to be booted from a floppy under these conditions, then drivers for the CD drive installed from the floppy. Be sure to try out your startup disk before you actually need it.

-- Read up on the DOS commands FDISK and FORMAT if you aren't already familiar with them. It helped a lot that I had a whole bunch of DOS books left over from my programming days.

-- If you start over from scratch installing Windows to an empty hard drive you can easily find yourself with an ugly and minimal display, no sound, no working modem, no working printer, and a mouse that no longer responds to all the buttons you're accustomed to using. When your computer was originally set up it had drivers installed for all these functions; unless you clone your old drive to the new one, you'll have to find and reinstall the necessary drivers to make everything work normally again. It turned out that zip files with almost the drivers I needed were already among the files I'd rescued from my old drive; all I had to do was figure out which ones I needed and how to get them to install themselves correctly. It took a fair amount of poking through their associated README files (and taking notes) to get everything figured out.

-- Burn copies of your drivers (preferably the self-installing zip files) and your notes to a CD or, better, to several CDs and put them in a safe place. It would have been better to do this ahead of time but I had to find out the hard way what I was going to need -- by seeing what happened without it.

After I had my system working from the new drive I bought another drive just like it and tried to clone the new drive to the newest one. For some reason the cloning software refused to do what I wanted so I ended up just formatting the new drive, copying all my files to it, and leaving it in the drive bay ready to put into service. If I ever needed it I'd still have to install Windows to it, then follow my notes to get everything else installed.

If after reading all this PlanningtoLive is still open to the idea of trying to do her own drive replacement, more power to her. If not, I hope this is more than enough information to make her feel OK about taking it to a pro.