Moving apps to an extrenal drive

[PaleKing]

Hi,
I am running a 5 year-old pc that is starting to become a bit of a battle with speed. It only has a 80GB hard drive and about 50GB of that is now taken up. Despite lots of attention from defragging, registry cleaners, adware/malware scans etc it's much slower than it used to be. This is especially true on startup and closedown and it occasionally goes to bluescreen when it's feeling particularly tempremental.

I have been advised that once a hard drive is over half full it can effect its performance so I would like to keep as much as possible on a Western Digital 160GB external hard drive that I've just bought. I can shift about 10GB of music and pictures over easily enough (I think), but what I'd really like some advice on is if there are any other programmes etc that can easily live on and be run from externally. For example are there any resourse-hog apps that can be run from the external drive easily? Is there any advice about where to start with this sort of thing? or anywhere you'd suggest I get advice?

Cheers

[Asurya]

or anywhere you'd suggest I get advice?

Yeah, me!
Buying an external hard disk was possible not the best solution in this case. It's true that once a disk has more data than free space it does start to suffer, but the main purpose of an external hard disk is storage as although you have vast amounts of space available to you, the speed at which you get to access this data is normally not an issue.

To answer your question directly, you can get away with running some applications from an external disk by un-installing them and re-installing them on the new disk, but any application which requires multiple read/writes from the disk is really (and I mean really) going to suffer in terms of performance. This will include applications like video/photo editing or anything remotely resembling a game.

However, all is not lost as the 160GB external disk you've purchased is really just a normal internal disk sitting inside a box. The reason that external disks are never as fast as internal disks as simply the cable used to connect them.

Internally, they are either IDE or SATA (and with a 5 year old PC it's hard to say which as SATA was just becoing mainstream at that time) and externally they are connected to the PC via USB, but the disk itself inside the box is still just IDE or SATA (and seeing as though it's new, it'll be SATA).

This is where it gets technical, assuming that the motherboard inside your PC supports SATA, you could simply bust open the external disk and install it inside your PC and remove the bottleneck (the USB connection).

...or if you haven't opened it yet, return it and buy in internal disk (of the correct type) and save some pennies.

If you want to hold off until Thursday night then feel free to bring the PC along to the club and I'll let you know exactly what type of connection your motherboard supports.