Need to put a new hard drive in hubbys 2007 macbook, question about OS

[RayOfHope]

The hard drive is dead in my husband's 2007 macbook. I'm going to replace the hard drive--will there be a problem if I install Snow Leopard instead of the installation disks that came with it? We seem to have misplaced the original installation disks, and now seems as good a time as any to upgrade the OS.

[struggle4progress]

1. If the 2007 had Leopard on it and hubby was doing Time Machine backups,

he should be able to restore everything onto the installed new HD by inserting the Leopard install disk (if you can find it) with the backup drive connected and running the TM restore routine. After that, you can upgrade to Leopard without much difficulty, though it may break some applications: search this forum for discussions back when Snow Leopard came out

But since Leopard (10.5) came out in late 2007, there's a good chance you have Tiger (10.4) on the system. I don't know whether (say) the Tiger versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote (say) work with Snow Leopard: in any case, Apple tries to get you to buy a box set of OSX + applications if upgrading from Tiger to Snow Leopard

Since Apple offers an upgrade route from Tiger to Snow Leopard, I think it's virtually certain SL will run on your machine, provided you meet the advertised Tech Specs: otherwise, they'd just PO a lot of folk. The caveat is that some hardware has had compatibility problems; I expect much of this has since been fixed with new drivers, but if you upgraded machine hardware since original purchase, it's worth double-checking about hardware

Snow Leopard Breaks Some App Compatibility
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/snow-leopard-mac-osx-compatibility,8556.html

Technical Specifications
http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html

[RayOfHope]

2. It was more of a casual use computer, his 'important' stuff he has on a couple flash drives

and his current HD is toast, lol.

I did a little research after posting here, and it looks like it will be fine. I checked tech specs and it meets the requirements. We never did use much of the ilife apps and aren't even going to worry about installing those.

Thanks for your help!