My Experience Getting a New Hard Drive

Question

I’m just posting this to provide some info to others who may be in the same position I was.
I have the original 17” Macbook Pro. Came with around a 95 gig HD and I'd run that up to about 75-80 gigs used. It was time to get a bigger drive but I didn’t want to do the job myself. I’ll do things like replace RAM, and on my old Dell desktops (back when I still used PCs) I replaced hard drives, added DVD players, etc...., but after watching tutorials on this, it just looked like more hassle than I was interested in incurring.
So, I found a local authorized Apple service provider that was willing to take a hard drive I supplied and replace it for $90, plus $30 for data transfer. Now I use my laptop for my small business so being without it is a challenge. I needed to minimize the time they had it so we arranged that if I dropped it off at lunch time I could get it back before closing that same day.
After reading various threads here and customer reviews, I bought a Hitachi 320 gig 7200 rpm drive at NewEgg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145228
Everything went really well. The computer definitely performs better with the new drive. It boots faster, apps launch faster, it’s really nice. The hard drive is quiet and smooth, quieter than the one it replaced, and is only $60 after mail in rebate.
The only thing I found odd about the whole thing was that when they transferred files from my old drive, they said they had to reinstall the operating system, it wasn’t just like taking a cloned image and restoring it. So I had to run Software Update several times and download and install some pretty hefty updates and reboot, so that took a good chunk of time.
but all in all, very happy I did it.

Answer 1

+*The only thing I found odd about the whole thing was that when they transferred files from my old drive, they said they had to reinstall the operating system, it wasn’t just like taking a cloned image and restoring it. So I had to run Software Update several times and download and install some pretty hefty updates and reboot, so that took a good chunk of time.*+
That's sort of odd... the easiest thing for them to do (and the least inconvenient thing for you) would simply have been for them to clone your drive. It takes really no effort and gives you back exactly what you gave them only with the increased space on the new drive.... especially since they charged you $30 for the data transfer. I'm not even really sure how they would do that. Are you saying that all your programs were migrated over but none of the updates were installed for the OS? I would think they would also have done the updates.
Oh well... it all worked out in the end I guess.