Moving entire contents of C: to external hard drive

[Eurox]

I have recently bought a maxtor 750 external hard drive that i keep permanantly connected to my laptop, my laptop only came with 80gb of memory (40 in c: and 20 in d:) and i would like to move all of this (or as much as possible) over to G: (the external one) so to free up the space on my laptop and make it perform better, cheers in advance

[Ethel]

I assume you are running Windows XP.

Moving your music, photos and files to G should be easy.

For example - Open My Music
Edit - select all

In the left hand panel, click 'move selected items' and choose G.

[Eurox]

Yea thats all easy simple stuff, but i want to move almost everything, including all programmes and as much as I can over, so that everything but the vital basics are running off the hard drive... if you get me?

[Ethel]

Very difficult to move programs, and I wouldn't recommend trying.

[wildwood]

The amount of data stored on your hard drive has no bearing whatsoever on the efficiency or speed of your computer. It is the number of application that are running that slow it down.

If you want to shift everything to the maxtor and think you can run windows from there, it won't go. You'll need to install windows on the external drive and set the computer to start from that.

You can however direct your programs to save stuff on the external drive by adjusting the preferences. Mail, photos, music, it can all be stored automatically on the maxtor.

[fo3nix]

Windows isn't set up to run like this.

Keep windows and programs on the internal drive, and put your music and photos etc. on the external.

Though, you'd be better to keep your personal stuff on both, in case one of them fails (and hard drives can fail).

Drag and drop the stuff you want to copy across.

[ACtheTROLL]

Moving my docs is just a right click | properties and change destination - windows will move the files and update your system

Almost disagree with wild ... discspace can slow a system ... the bigger the lookup ... the longer to access files (and probably the greater the impact of fragmentation).
but normally ... not much

Internal drives can write simoltaneously (almost)
and microsoft recommend putting the pagefile on a separate physical disc to the O/s

and I run with a system drive (50Gb) which is separate to my prog files partition (100Gb) but they're on the same disc.
.... but ethel is right .... you can't just move them

fo3 is also right ... the system isn't designed to run with a USB disc on the system side - only data.
the sustained bandwidth just isn't fast enough - and the internal hub is shared with all your other USB devices.

[liascm]

thats really easy just select it all and move it but be careful before some files are required to run windws properly so leave the d drive alone and transfer music and documents etc[personal stuff] but leave folders like system 32 alone