I have an old NEC Versa E3100 laptop. The battery has died and it will cost a few bucks to replace. It's not worth the expense as the HDD is only 60Gb and i have a couple of other replacements, a 500Gb HP and a backup ASUS Netbook. What I would like to do is place the NEC HDD in an external case and use it as a separate drive for the HP.

As the full set of apps are still on the drive, how do I go about removing them (eg, WinXP, etc) and leaving some of the apps and of course, all of the data?

Cheers