Vista - External Hard Drive

Heya Guys Im Thinkin of gettin A External Hard Drive for my laptop seeing as bad as* Vista takes Up 20GB and all my programs and music pictures take up the rest of the space im now down to only 20GB on my 60GB hard drive i need an external Hard Drive and i was looking around a 500GB to 750GB external drive

And The Majorty of my space is being taken up by all my programs
i mean i would uninstall them its just that i need them for my college cousre so i cant really !!

So i wanted to know if you can install programs for example like Photoshop CS3, Adobe Fireworks CS3, Corel Draw 14 and so

can be installed on a external hard drive i've got the space and i know all bout the shourtcuts and when i want to use that program i'll have to plug in the hard drive but i'll keep on top of it i always do

Thanks
Crazy Axis

Why not just upgrade your internal hard drive and be done with it? You running a laptop or desktop?

Hi crazy axis,

as it's a laptop is possibly best way to go and should be OK as long as the programs themselves give an advanced option or similar which specifies where to install. wouldn't want to try it manually after install .

only problem with external would be possibility of drive letter changes But I think that if you allocate a specific drive letter using vista's drive management, somewhere in the middle (m,n,o etc) vista will retain this info, Fixed drives C:, D:, E: etc Removable Z:,Y:,X: ... by default

also if you go this way you may want to un-install some of your existing apps on C: and re-install to the removable to give some space on C: for Appdata and such which I know adobe products write quite a lot of

also moving your personal data to the removable is an option.

hope this helps

I've used a Western Digital 500GB USB 2.0 External Drive for sometime. It is definitely possible to install programs to it. Some critical files will still be copied to your boot drive and utilized by windows. However the largest data chunks will remain on your portable drive.

Personally I have not experienced a drive letter change when plugging in my drive. I suppose its possible if your adding other products like card readers, USB thumb drives, or other externals. However in using only one product for external storage, I have experienced no issues.

i have also installed utilities to an external drive and found no problems...i have had a drive letter change but that was my own stupid fault i wernt paying attention and i just seen a box appear and i clicked ok and boom everythin went heywire.. i got it sorted out in the end tho

You can use software's on the external hard drive. I also do that. But there is one issue if you have a USB pen drive or a different hard drive connected then there could be an issue of the drive letter change. So you have to be careful when you do that.

I plan on doing the same.

Would it be okay then to defragment this external hard drive? (I've got it connected via Firewire, although USB is also an available connection if defragmentation is needed)

Id contenance this as well seeing as hard drives are pretty cheap now.

Indeed - with the added bonus that most laptops still use slow 5400 rpm drives - just changing to a 7200 rpm drive can make a world of difference in terms of speed and responsiveness.