Using Acronis to add harddrive space for better laptop performance

I always travel with a small computer, and I used my Lenovo (IBM) X60 when I travelled around the world back in 2004. It survived a drop from the Great Wall as well as cracks in the armor and screen.

Performance was getting bad, mostly because of a 60GB small 2.5" drive and no real swap area. I decided to add the 7500/320GB drive from centralcomputers.com ($60, a bargain).

The only problem was how to get the existing configuration onto the new drive. I knew that Ghost from Symantec could do the job, but was unwilling to deal with software from Symantec as it is cumbersome to install and remove and always seems to take over your entire PC.
I googled other alternatives and found two I looked at:

1. DriveImage XML (free)
2. Acronis True Image (free 15 day trial)

I tried with the free option (very slow btw.) and found that it just does not work. The drive would not boot after the transfer, so I dropped that (after the fact I found other claims to the fact that it does not work).

Acronis is another story. Great sw, easy to install, easy to remove. No reboots needed.
I mirrored the two partitions from the old 60 GB drive to a harddrive on another PC (using a USB/SATA connector), connected the new 300 GB drive, formatted it, mirrored the partitions from the PC to the new drive all using Acronis True Image. Very easy to use..

One thing I had to do after the transfer: 1. Expand the small (60 GB) partition that was copied from the old drive, to the 300 GB drive.

Done; I now have a much faster laptop. And room to grow.