Hard Drive Upgrade

[WaltR]

I have a Emachine Laptop running Windows XP Home Addition. This machine has been a work horse and I haven't been willing to give it up just yet. It has an 80 gb hard drive that is getting dangerously close to filling up. I purchase a WD 320 GB pata drive. Cloned my old drive, installed the new drive but my system will only recognize the drive as 137gb. I have spent hours researhing how I can get my system to recognize the full capacity of this drive. It seems I have two options.
1) upgrade the bios which is a phoenix bios. The problem here is I can't find an upgrade for this bios. The Phonenix Web site doesn't seem to offer bios upgrades or if so I can't find it.

2) upgrade the 32 bit something or other from Microsoft to 44 bit. I don't have a clue on how or if this can be done with my XP system.

Here are my questions.

I heard I could upgrade to Windows 7 and it would recognize the drive but my understanding is that I need about 4GB of memory for Windows 7 to operate correctly and my laptop is already maxed out at 1.250GB.

Is there a program that anyone has used or knows about that I can run to make my computer recognize this drive.

Or, am I forced to buy a new computer?

Any suggestions would be greatly apprecitated.

Thanks,

Walt