Advice wanted on upgrading

[coldraven]

but minus Virtual Box and some Google and Gwibber files that take forever to backup.

That may be because you are trying to back-up files that are bigger than 4GB to a drive that is formatted as FAT32.
The solution would be to buy another external drive and use gparted to format it to ext4 or NTFS. You would then be able to copy large files over.

As already mentioned the simplest solution would be to just put a new drive into your machine. Then put the old drive into a cheap enclosure so that you can always access your data, presuming that it's not encrypted.
I put a bigger drive into this laptop, it was easy and took 10 minutes.

[MoebusNet]

@ShowMeGrrl: I don't think anyone has suggested that you try out a Live-DVD or Live-USB copy of Ubuntu yet. This would allow you to verify hardware compatibility wthout making changes to your present hard drive; you simply boot from the Live-version and try it out. Also, I think the separate System76 drivers have been rolled into 12.04.4 by now - it would still be a good idea to try out the Live version first to make sure.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD (this was written before the iso images were too big to fit on a CD; they fit on a DVD now. The priciples are the same, though.)

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...n/FromUSBStick (this talks about installation mainly, but also talks about running Ubuntu from USB without installing.)

http://knowledge76.com/index.php/System76_Driver (these drivers are usually rolled into Ubuntu as it is updated.)

Hopefully this will give you an option to help your decision about upgrading.

[sudodus]

@ShowMeGrrl: I don't think anyone has suggested that you try out a Live-DVD or Live-USB copy of Ubuntu yet. This would allow you to verify hardware compatibility wthout making changes to your present hard drive; you simply boot from the Live-version and try it out.

... I did in post #2, but it is worth mentioning again