Katherine Georges said:
Outlook Express's .pst email file is stored on the external hard
drive. I installed MS Accounting there as well. Will Office work on
the external hard drive?
First a minor clarification: Outlook and Outlook Express are two
entirely different products from a user's viewpoint. They are as
different as Excel and Word are.
Outlooks uses a .pst file. Outlook Express does not: It uses .dbx
files. So above you meant Outlook's .pst email file. AANYway, now that
I've done my FYI for those, I'll move on<g>!
Yes, Office should work OK on an external hard drive that also has MS
Accounting installed on it. In fact, you could install several programs
on the external hard drive and they will all work OK as long as you
don't disconnect the external drive or power it down and it's properly
installed. My sister did it that way for over a year before she
finally got a larger hard drive.
From the other posts, it looks like you're using the external drive to
make up for a lack of room on your C drive. That's not "bad", but it's
not recommended either for a few reasons, one of which is:
-- Installing software on the external drive does NOT really put ALL of
the program's needs on that drive. For technical reasons, parts of the
install MUST reside on your system drive, usually drive C. So each
install to the external drive of programs such as you mentioned will
still add parts of the programs to the C drive; just not anywhere near
as much as it puts on the external drive.
-- You could, not will, experience some slowdowns in the operations of
those programs because of the transfer speeds. So if that happens,
don't let it surprise you; it'll be normal.
There are other reasons too, but I won't go into them except to add
that the best use for an external drive is for backup or image storage
of your hard drive/s. If you're not doing backups, you'll learn to
appreciate their value in a 25 minute disk replacement versus two days
or so manually.
Drives are so cheap right now that you would find things a lot
simpler to work with if you bought yourself a new, or additional drive,
for your computer. You can get 500 Gig drives for less than $100 some
places, and 80 Gigs have gotten very cheap, as have 160 Gig and 300 Gig
drives. IMO ideally you'd want about 50 Gig just for your operating
system so future growth won't bring y ou back to your current problems.
Unless you're planning to change computers, th at is.
Either the new or the old drive could then become a separate hard
drive to store more information on and you could then have ALL of your
installs contained entirely on the C drive where they really belong and
which will be less confusing 6 months from now or next week when you've
forgotten what's where. Or if it's big enough, make the old drive JUST
for the operating syst em and put all data on the other drives and send
backups to the external drive.
It's your call obviously, as all I'm doing is givng you my own
opinions here. It's essentially just what I and many others do but you
can do about anything that will work for you.
HTH,
Twayne`
