[meiling]

I have a laptop and was wondering if I purchased an external hard drive for it, can I dload programs on the ext. hard drive and run the programs from there? only found info. about back up, music and pictures. Can you actually dload a program such as Pinnacle Studio 10 plus, which is a video editing program to an external hard drive and use the program. Or is that not what an external hard drive was designed for? ANY HELP?

[AuroraDizon]

Yea, an external hard drive works like an internal hard drive. The only difference being that its not physically inside your computer. I have a partition which is just one physical drive cut into more drives. So it should work the same way. I would imagine your biggest problem with running say a video editing software is having it installed on that drive. It depends on the software, sometimes it auto-installs on C:/ and sometimes you can tell it where to install. I think that if you stuck it in your external drive that it should install there, but like I said it s up to the software sometimes. My example would be some Palm One software for PDA's before I only had an f:/ drive and had no c:/ drive at all and it would only install on a c:/ drive. Now, not to get too complex but you can run a virtual machine and run an operating system within an operating system in order to run the program off another drive. If say your biggest problem is space on your computer.. say your computer has like 10 gigs.. and the external hard drive has 250... you might want to just install an os on there and boot from that drive. Ok, I did a test for you and I installed a program that has to physically install onto my F:/ drive instead of my C:/ drive and I think its going to run.. Yes it seems to be running fine. I don't think you should have too many problems. Although I would imagine there are some programs that have to install things onto your C:/windows/system files, or maybe application common file data or etc I'm not sure whether it would create new folders on your external drive and use them, or if it would actually install on your drive with the operating system and then it would work.. you could always move them around if they didn't.But like I said I don't think it should be too much trouble. Hope that helped.Downloading copyrighted programs is illegal and cannot be discussed on this forum.

[jbking]

You could, though I think it is worth understanding the possible shortcomings of this:1) The application may not be as portable as you'd think due to registry settings and other files in the system that aren't necessarily stated in advance. So for example while you could store music and video files on it and just unplug the drive from one machine and plug it into another and listen to the music or watch the video this isn't necessarily the case with all applications.2) If the ext. hard drive fails then you'd have to reinstall the program or restore a backup to use it.3) There can also be connection speed differences so that an internal drive connection may be faster than USB or Firewire.Regards,JB

[meiling]

Thanks for your response. After reading them, I think that maybe I am getting into something that I know nothing about. I have the video editing program on my desk top computer and now I have a laptop, which is much more comfortable using sitting on the couch. lol. I have the room on my hard drive on my lap top, but the program is so big and it states that it uses alot of memory when i make videos, that I thought that if i got an ext. hard drive I would be able to dload the program and make my videos on that rather than my internal hard drive. I never considered speed or any other things mentioned in your responses. I thought that I could just hook it up through my usb connection and just go from there. I dont want to have to get into changing things on my new laptop. Like I said dont know to much about computers. I like to try to keep them the way I received them. If I were to do this, how would i found out about the speed? Can I get an ext. hard drive with the same speed as my laptop? I didnt want to use the ext. on other machines, just my laptop and just for that program. Im not sure if I am able to tell this program where to dload either. I never thought of that. Regarding an operating system. on my laptop I have windows xp media center. Can I dload a different windows xp on a ext. hard drive without messing up my laptop?

[meiling]

Sorry for my other posts on same subject. Wasnt sure if I had the right area to ask the question so I posted it under 2 different categories. AGAIN THANKS FOR YOUR RESPONSES.

[AuroraDizon]

It keeps all your information in once place. Thank you for understanding.Ok I'm trying to get this straight, you want to use your laptop for video editing.. but its too bulky of a program? The space of your external hard drive isn't going to change the speed of your processor or the amount of ram available for use on your laptop. It will just give you more space to save the program on.. as far as running the program when its on your computer that's a different story.Most laptops are slower then desktops, if your laptop is too slow to run the program stick to video editing on your desktop.

[matchbox2022]

Well, at least try installing it to the external, if you can't, try a regular install and a simple cut and paste of the whole program folder to the external, just be sure you get the whole thing. It should still look into your hd to find the registry if need be for a key or what not. Might as well give it a shot, I do it and it works fine, word of warning though, it WILL run a fair bit slower, USB 2.0 even isn't at all like an xpress port, even if you're external is a 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 RPM breaking mach speed hard drive.Things like graphic cards will be external soon by the sounds of things, nice for us!

[jbking]

Let's back up a moment here to explain a few things:Memory to me usually means RAM which is different from a hard drive. Granted that virtual memory uses a hard drive but if you are going to do memory intensive tasks then I'd suggest having lots of RAM in the system regardless of desktop or laptop as both of mine have 2 GB of RAM and run just fine. If a program needs lots of hard drive space for temporary files then be aware that this can mean that speed is a bigger factor as you may not like waiting a few minutes for a big file to get saved. How much RAM is on the laptop is the big question here as if you have less than 1 GB I would consider upgrading if possible while if you already have 2 GB or more then you should be OK.I think you may use the term download too much and at times this sets off warning bells for some. While you can download some programs this is different from installing software which is where you can specify where you want most of the files to be placed while running the installation program.The speed point is about how the drive is connected to the system. Your internal hard drive uses one type of cable likely and a USB hard drive would likely use something else. This is independent of the other factors of speed on a hard drive like its RPM for example Also, I forgot about the part where if you get into larger external drives, e.g. 100 GB or more, that these will have their own power cords while the smaller ones can just be attached via USB but tend to be smaller, e.g. 4 GB or less usually.Don't put another operating system on the ext. drive unless you are sure you want to since I'm pretty sure Windows doesn't boot from an USB drive yet for one point and for another it isn't going to needed at all. The mentioning of 2 computers was in cases like my own where I have 2 computers and at times like to move things between them without messing with the firewall or other things too much.Regards,JB

[matchbox2022]

Quoi?

[meiling]

Thanks for your responses. I guess I shouldnt have used the word download. I am installing a program. My laptop has 1 gig on it and upgradeable to 2 gigs with an 80gb PATA HDD, ( just know that means 80 gig.) has a AMD turion 64 mobile technology MK36 (2.0 GHz, 512KB L2 cache) ATi Radeon Express 1100. The program states system requirement: 1. Windows XP - I have windows xp media center 2. Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon 1.4 Mhz or higher (2.4 Ghz or higher recommended). I assume Im ok with that. 3. Direct x 9 or higher compatible graphics card with 32mb (ATI Radeion or NVIDIA Geforce 3 or higher with 128mb recommended. - Assume Im ok, not sure 4. 512 mb Ram (1 gb recommended.) 5. 3 gigs to install - good there.Well anyways, I cant run it on my laptap. Installed the program and it stated to restart comp. I did that and upon restarting it just hung at the Windows XP screen for at least 10 minutes before going to my desk top. Then I finally tried to open the program and it just hung there - never got to open the programs. I uninstalled the program and computer still hung at the Windows XP screen. Had to do a system restore. Computer back to normal and my desk top appears within seconds. Guess I have to just stick with running the program on my desk top computer as opposed to both. A little dissappointed. Dont know what happened. Thanks for all your responses. Just found this site and am telling all friends about it. I guess my laptop doesnt have the programs requirements to run. By the way, how many times can you do a system restore with messing up computer? or doesnt it matter?

[matchbox2022]

dude, what program is that? I've never heard of that before, and even then, the program should fail to run only if u dont have the requirements, oy, it shouldnt even install, they're designed as such these days...System restore is notoriously unreliable, but depending on how you use it, you may only need to reupdate some stuff, and watch youre hard drive fragment quite a bit, but all u need to do for that is a defrag, windows xp can do it fine since its thankfully not a huge mess of bad sectors i find. But yes, you should definately try it, there is something very wrong either hardware wise or system file conflict wise if its hanging for 10 freaking minutes.

[meiling]

Program is Pinnacle Studio Plus 10. This is new laptop, got for xmas present. Havent installed anything on this yet other than that above program and had those problems. Otherwise, computer runs great. Being that I listed what is on my laptop and the requirements that the program requires am I covered with the requirements? Also when I came across the hang up and not being able to open the program, should I have done a sys. defrag? would may of corrected the problem?

[matchbox2022]

Well you can try one, it wouldn't have mattered since as soon as it installs it is completely fine. it only gets a wee bit corrupted after using it alot, then not in large intervals.