what can you store on an external hard drive

[JOLLYLASS]

hi all
i am wondring if i can speed up my pc by transferring my daughters 3 sims games onto an external hard drive that she can just plug in via usb whenever she wants to play. since putting on the 3rd game at xmas, our pc is really slow. She is away at uni most of the time so this solution would be really useful if its possible. if not, do we have to get a bigger memory for the pc instead?? thanks in advance.

[Postdog]

An external hard drive is best used for storage and back up only - you could install programs on this but I should think it would need to be be permanently attached, not just plugged in as and when required.

[vehelpfulguy]

INSTALLING a game (or any other program) will have little or no effect on the performance of your PC. A program (or game) just sitting there on the hard disk is using no PC resources.

What does slow a PC down is when a program or game is RUNNING.

Any program or game running (including Windows) is loaded to memory, and the more programs in memory the slower the PC will get.

So you need find out what programs are running, and see if there are any that are not needed.

This is not always as easy as it sounds because Windows runs all sorts of programs just to keep Windows going and you cant just shut them down as you have no idea what effect that may have.

So shut down any obvious programs that you are not using. So dont leave Word, Excel, your browser and a game or two all running as they are using PC memory.

The best way to speed up a slow PC is to add more memory (that is real memory or RAM, not hard disk memory)

[JOLLYLASS]

Thank you v helpfulguy, i will look into getting more RAM.