External hard drive?

[Trumpess]

Good afternoon one and all.

Recently I went out and brought and external hard drive, so I can free up space on my laptop, in an aim to make it run faster.
I have alot of photos and music files, work programmes etc that does slow the system down, especially on start up.
This external hard drive came with no instructions.
I would have thought by plugging it in it would have automatically told me what to do, but no.
I am kind of asuming that I need to manually place files in to the hard drive like i would copying to a disc?

Is there anyone out there that could possibly in lighten me please?

Thanks.

[dilz]

yup you do,once you plugg it in,go to my computer and it should be there,then just drag and drop or copy and paste in to your external hard drive.hope this helps

[Trumpess]

Thanks for that Dilz.

When I want to get into the external hard drive, I take it I just go to "My Computer" and click on the icon of the external hard drive like I would accessing stuff normally on the computer?

[Nagash]

Yup, that's pretty much it.

It's just a really big flash disk essentially,

Open it up from My Computer and then just drag and drop whatever you want into it.

[Trumpess]

Thank you - bling on the way!!

[NighthawkNZ]

What he said... you can also make a shortcut Icon on your desktop and even add it to your start menu etc...

[The Lone Rider]

Keep in mind it's not neccessarily a very full hard drive that makes your computer boot up slow, and run slow.

Personally, because mp3s, doc, and many other document type files are so small, I burn them to a DVD and archive them. 4gb is a lot of text documents.

Good maintence practices with Windows is the key to keeping it running smooth. I've had this same computer for 8 years and running fair the same as when I got it. Defragging, uninstalling software not being used, checking windows startup ops, and cutting out excess stuff like those sounds you can make windows play when you minimize a window are all things you can do to speed up a computer.

Like an old style chopper, strip it down to it's bare essentials, look after what is left and it should have less to break down on you.

8year old 3.2ghz HT P4, 1.5gb RAM, 128mb graphics card, 24/96 audio card + 16/44.1 5.1 Audio card and still going well is impressive in my opinion.

[breakaway]

There is absolutely no correlation between how full your hard drive is and the speed that your comptuer runs at.

It will run slow if

1. You have spyware
2. You have lots of programs which run on start up which whore your memory
3. Your disk is fragemented (This could be a reason, however I have never noticed a performance increase after using windows defragmenter even thouhg my disk was apparently badly fragmented)

Solution: you need to transfer all the files you wish to keep to your external hard drive, then wipe everything on the laptop and install a fresh copy of windows. This is known as a format. Then install proven and trusted anti-spyware and anti-virus software.

Windows (XP and Vista) are just built in such a way (registry) that after a few months of use and installing applications, they will fuck out and start running like shit. It's a fact of life, you have to deal with it, by formatting.

If you still experience slow running after format, you need to upgrade your memory and CPU. Also note that most laptops have 5400RPM drives while most desktop computers have 7200RPM drives, meaning laptop drives are slower. This can be upgraded.

[The Lone Rider]

Dont agree with you on formatting - this computer has never had it done and formatting is only a last resort for the amount of hassle it is copying everything over, deleting everything, then reinstall, then set everything back up the way you like it, then transferring files back.

I suggest CCleaner to tidy up your registries and files no longer needed as well as deleting temp files.


There is absolutely no correlation between how full your hard drive is and the speed that your comptuer runs at.

It will run slow if

1. You have spyware
2. You have lots of programs which run on start up which whore your memory
3. Your disk is fragemented (This could be a reason, however I have never noticed a performance increase after using windows defragmenter even thouhg my disk was apparently badly fragmented)

Solution: you need to transfer all the files you wish to keep to your external hard drive, then wipe everything on the laptop and install a fresh copy of windows. This is known as a format. Then install proven and trusted anti-spyware and anti-virus software.

Windows (XP and Vista) are just built in such a way (registry) that after a few months of use and installing applications, they will fuck out and start running like shit. It's a fact of life, you have to deal with it, by formatting.

If you still experience slow running after format, you need to upgrade your memory and CPU. Also note that most laptops have 5400RPM drives while most desktop computers have 7200RPM drives, meaning laptop drives are slower. This can be upgraded.

[Slyer]

Easiest bling ever earned!

[NighthawkNZ]

There is absolutely no correlation between how full your hard drive is and the speed that your comptuer runs at.



Crap...

If the HDD is full and Windows doesn't have enough room to make its temp page files (usually requires a good gig of free space) you system will become very slow...

It also depends on the Version of windows which the OP didn't state... the more files on your HDD the bigger the FAT becomes and the slower the search and opening and while defraging helps its only helps make the files in one place on the disk so it doesn't have to read teh FAT 3 or 4 times to open the one file...

[breakaway]

Fair point, but by default XP (and up) allocates virtual memory from a range of 1x - 2x your physical memory memory. That means if you have 2GB of memory, your system will always have a minimum of 2GB on hdd page file available, and a maximum of 4GB On-HDD page file. If you somehow max out your HDD, that means that 1 x your virtual memory will still be available as it is always allocated. I doubt that in the grand scheme of things having a larger page file would actually make that big a difference, unless the OP was running 256MB of memory, but then again having 256MB of memory would make things shit slow anyway.

Trumpess, right click on my computer, select 'Properties' and tell us what CPU and how much RAM you have. It should say:

<img src='http://iforce.co.nz/i/25d33d2e6dc7c11f4b1b0f5f73c78ce3.PNG'/>

[CookMySock]

If the HDD is full and Windows doesn't have enough room to make its temp page files (usually requires a good gig of free space) you system will become very slow...If you have a gig or two of RAM and you are swapping, you have bigger problems to resolve.

Steve

[Slyer]

If you have a gig or two of RAM and you are swapping, you have bigger problems to resolve.

Steve
Problems? What?

[Quailboy]

To make your computer run faster, you could also go Start -> Run -> type 'msconfig' -> go along to 'services' and 'startup' and deselect unnecessary items in those. Be careful what you deselect though.

Heres a good list of what you can and can't uncheck. (http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php)

[Slyer]

That's for starting faster mainly, unless you have some monster app hogging the system.
Norton for example. :)