Hi guyz,

 

My son has loaded his laptop up with many programs/files, ranging from xbox things to school projects, and now running very slow, so i got him an external hard drive to transfer all the programs/files to, and speed the laptop up after a defrag and disc clean. The only thing is.... how do i transfer these programs/files to the hard drive to his laptop?

I tried clicking on the shortcut on desktop and then selecting "send to" and sending to the external hard drive, but after connecting the E.H. it will not open/operate.

Can anyone give me a puter illiterate guide on how to send these items to an E.H. and remove them from the laptop and still operate as normal when the E.H. is connected.

 

Many thanks people..... :thumbup1:

 

Al. :blush:

If I've understood correctly what you've wrote, your trying to put the desktop shortcut onto the external hard drive, when you need to move the actual program/files to the hard drive rather than the desktop shortcut.

 

Some programs will only run off the primary hard drive, ie the hard drive inside your pc, it all depends on the types of programs

The external hard drive is just a storage media and doesnt have or need any operating software. Large files like mp3's or movies can be played from the ED but im not sure about games, ive not tried it with mine.

That sounds correct matey..

 

How do i do transfer the programs buddy...

 

Al.

Copy from where the original is stored and paste to the external drive, once you have it working, delete then from your laptop or uninstall.

If you right click the desktop short cut and select "properties" in the window that opens up, look in the box labelled target and that will point you to the folder that holds the program, then work your way through "my computer" to find the folder

 

Hope that helps

Copy from where the original is stored and paste to the external drive, once you have it working, delete then from your laptop or uninstall.

 

Cheerz Groover, the only thing is, i cannot find where the original is stored.... :no:

 

Al. :thumbup1:

If you right click the desktop short cut and select "properties" in the window that opens up, look in the box labelled target and that will point you to the folder that holds the program, then work your way through "my computer" to find the folder

 

Hope that helps

 

Ok.... cool, i will give it a try tomoz, just a little bit peed now, Saturday night an all, soz.....lol :tongue_smilie:

 

Al. :thumbup1:

Normally, my computer, program files, if its not in your start menu.

Doesn't really matter where the programs are stored, it won't speed it up being on another drive much, you probably need some more ram, or decrease the amount of startup programs residing in memory to free some ram up.

You can't move installed programs to an external drive, because they are registered in their current location on the local hard drive. You can really only move files, such as mp3s, video files, picture files and Office files as well as shortcuts, favourites and other things in your profile.

There are some workarounds to re-register program files in other locations, but I've had limited success with that and wouldn't recommend it at all. If the machine is running slowly then I'd move large files to the external drive, defrag it and try removing unnecessary programs from startup. This is done by clicking Start>Run and typing msconfig. Under startup, you will see a list of startup items, which you can disable most of to speed up the boot time. Most of this stuff isn't really needed anyway, but you might want to keep anything that looks Anti-virus related, graphics card management, and anything that's related to CD/DVDROM burning software.

You can't move installed programs to an external drive, because they are registered in their current location on the local hard drive. You can really only move files, such as mp3s, video files, picture files and Office files as well as shortcuts, favourites and other things in your profile.

There are some workarounds to re-register program files in other locations, but I've had limited success with that and wouldn't recommend it at all. If the machine is running slowly then I'd move large files to the external drive, defrag it and try removing unnecessary programs from startup. This is done by clicking Start>Run and typing msconfig. Under startup, you will see a list of startup items, which you can disable most of to speed up the boot time. Most of this stuff isn't really needed anyway, but you might want to keep anything that looks Anti-virus related, graphics card management, and anything that's related to CD/DVDROM burning software.

 

 

aggreed, but i would probrably use a program like ccleaner (google it) to amend startu up and uninstall things, its a little more user friendly

yeah good tips above ^ the only real case where too many files would slow down your system is where you don't have enough RAM and part of your hard drive is being used as virtual memory, which in turn is taking ages to read because it may be so fragmented.

my 2p's worth: run Disk Cleanup first (should be under Accessories, System Tools) and after its scanned tick all boxes except 'compress old files' and 'catalog files' and click 'OK'. This is a good thing to carry out every couple of months or so depending on how much your laptop is used.

Next, hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete to bring up Task Manager, click the Processes tab at the top, and tell us how many Processes are running (bottom-left corner). These processes are all the programs you are running, plus all background processes required to keep Windows running, plus anything that's found its way onto your laptop that shouldn't be there. I have 45 at the moment, some people (especially those that like to optimise their PC) will have fewer (perhaps 25), some may have more. The more you've got, the slower your system will run.

Next, right-click My Computer and hit Properties. Tell us what processor(s) you have (eg. Pentium 4 3.4Ghz) and how much RAM you have (eg. 2GB).

CCleaner as mentioned above is another useful tool that you can download for free (legally!).

Doing a defrag (I think this is in System Tools as well) regularly always helps (always do this last after all other tasks like Cleanup, moving or deleting files) as it reorders whatever files remain on your disc.

what version of windows are you runing? as if its vista there will be a whole load more processes than any other windows. also if your not 100% confident, then ccleaner would be an easyer way to clean the disc, also the same company does a prog called defraggler which is very good and seems to be a bit faster than windows

 

http://www.piriform.com/

K first off, credentials, I'm an IT Engineer, do NOT move programs to an external drive, you will likely lose the ability to run some if not all of them. In the case of a windows laptop, just simply buy a program called O&O Defrag, it doesn't cost much and will de-frag the drive properly. The other thing you need to do is minimize the startup applications, which is a whole other problem, but would be willing to help you through it if you like. The reason more programs = slower machine is usually directly related to the fact that every piece of software you have thinks it deserves to run at startup, which takes up RAM and processing power, if you minimize the programs that are actually allowed to startup when you start the computer, you will save yourself a whole load of problems.

do NOT move programs to an external drive, you will likely lose the ability to run some if not all of them.

 

if your really desperate to get them onto the drive your best bet is to save your data (save games etc) uninstall the software, then reinstall it to the external drive :-)

Seems to be a lot of misconceptions going on about programs and moving them, you can move programs to an external harddrive and still get them to run depending on 1 thing, your operating system, if its windows xp, vista and windows 7 you will be fine moving games over and certain programs as windows will fix the registry entries its self and all you have to do is create a new short cut for the game from the new location. if he has xbox live you will have to reinstall it to the external harddrive. steam is another one that will not run once moved as even when installing to another harddrive it will put a steam folder in your C drive (local) (you can still run steam from the other hard drive so long as you do not move the steam folder out of your c drive that it puts in there.

 

Best way though to make sure that there are no conflicts, would be to just uninstall everything you can, and when it asks to delete configuration / save games or info, state no, and then reinstall everything on the external harddrive, this way it keeps the save folders, and just copy them from the c drive into the new location *sometimes it saves save games and info in the documents folder, sometimes in hidden system files with in documents.

 

My only concern would be, that in doing so you are actually going against what you are trying to achieve and that is speeding up the system. moving large amounts of files from the parent hard drive onto a external will actually slow things down as the transfer rate over USB is a lot slower than IDE / SATA, even if the hard drive is rated the same.

 

Most problems with slowing down of the system especially on start up can be attributed to what you have starting up, if you have a lot of icons down by your clock for instance, windows has to load all these in before it even lets you take full control of your system, these then sit in your ram and hog it.

 

Most programs dont need to start when windows does as half the time your hardly going to use them for the day, yet they like to start so they are ready to go, Winamp is a prim example of this. Best way of stopping a program starting when windows does, is right clicking the icon in your system tray (down near your clock), going to options and deselecting "start when windows starts" or its equivalent. on rare occasions this is not present and you will need to stop it starting by running MSCONFIG from the run command and selecting "selective start up", but id advise you read up on that program before you use it as it can stop your system from starting completely if you stop the wrong thing.

 

Best way of speeding up any system now a days is looking at upgrading, CPU getting old? Less ram to run more ram intensive up to date programs, time for a upgrade.

 

Biggest problem with laptops is, they tend to be hard to upgrade, acer for instance used to use ram specially made just for there system so upgrading would be a nightmare.

Edited February 13, 201114 yr by vodkashots

A lot of what vodkashots said is correct, I would seriously suggest against moving installed applications to a different drive though, Windows 7 copes a lot better than Vista or XP did with that kind of thing, but still not reliably, the fact is it isn't a mac, nor is it Linux, if it were, it'd be a lot more reliable and easier to do.

 

He is also very right about moving programs to another drive slowing things down, although not quite for the right reasons. USB 2.0 is the same speed as SATA2 is (3ghz or thereabouts), both of which are a LOT faster than anything on IDE (Slower that SATA 1 which is 1.5Ghz or thereabouts), that being said, if the programs are on a separate drive, it's one more thing for the computer to think about when loading them, not so bad if it's another internal drive on SATA (Not possible on a laptop) because Windows will recognise that as a permanent drive, a USB one will only ever have temporary links to it within the OS and they will be struck up every time it boots, it will never add them properly as fixed links and registry entries, meaning more overhead on both RAM and Processing power every time you try to run them. (Also, although USB2.0 is rated at 3.0Ghz, so is Firewire, which is faster, because it's not the speed, it's the protocol, USB2.0 is more like half way between SATA 1 and SATA 2, where Firewire truly is like SATA, but still not recognised as a permanent drive)

 

He has re-iterated and indulged on what I said about startup apps, very very important thing to sort out, be careful with MSConfig though, in the wrong hands it can completely screw up your computer, if you stop the wrong application or service on startup, the machine won't boot properly.

 

My recommendation is still to purchase O&O defrag and limit your startup applications, this will be the best way of speeding up the system. Move non-essential (i.e. not game or program related) files like pictures, music and documents to your seperate drive, then run O&O defrag while nothing else is running for best results. Clearing temporary files tends to help on older versions of Windows too, as they got clogged up and increase fragmentation. Once you've done that, download a free application called Spybot Search & Destroy, it is completely free and has instructions for use, it will remove unwanted spyware and malware that could be slowing the machine down by using up CPU and RAM, it also has an immunisation feature which stops other spyware and malware getting onto the machine in the first place.

 

Switch your internet browser as well if you're still using Internet Explorer, I personally recommend either Google Chrome (Very fast but can be buggy occasionally) or Mozilla Firefox, both are free, both are more virus and malware resistant and both are more compliant with web coding standards anyway, so you tend to get a better experience on the web.

Excellent feedback people, Thank you all very much. I am off work on Wednesday and will try all the things stated in your replies, and i will let you all kniow how i get on. Just hope i don't blow the laptop up!!!!! lol.

 

Thanks again guyz,

 

Al.

Just a little update.....

 

I have stopped many, and i mean many programs form running at start-up, deleted many unused programs that my son does not use any more, and transferred any relevent items to his external hard drive.

The system is now running at a nice speed with availabe space on the "C" drive.

Many thanks for all your suggestions/guides, would not have done it without you guyz....

 

Thanks again,

 

Alz.