Installing/running software off an external HDD?

[Darwock]

Is this possible/recommended?

Specifically online stuff, I'm not a PC gamer at all and my home PC is ****e, but I have a decent work laptop I could use. However I wouldn't want to taint it in any way. Also it would save me losing stuff if I ever got the sack

So is USB 2.0 up to the job? Are there other issues I haven't considered?

[babs]

Yes, registry settings. The machine you install it on will have them, the laptop won't. You could of course just export those settings and merge them on the other laptop (if you have the priviliges), you'd also probably have to make sure it was recognised as the same drive letter, so maybe manually set it to Z or something.

[Darwock]

Thanks babs, bit confused though - I would only be installing on the work machine, just putting the software onto the external HDD instead of the C drive. I hadn't thought about registry settings, but hopefully they wouldn't get me into any trouble (and I do have admin rights to the laptop).

The only thing that would be on the laptop would be registry settings and shortcuts, I hope...

Apart from that, no data speed issues I should be worried about?

Another daft thought, can windows be installed on an external HDD and specified as the boot device? Surely not, forget I said that lol.

[babs]

Yes, it can!

If you have a reasonably new motherboard/bios you can boot from USB HD.

[babs]

Transfer speed won't be as good as via a directly wired HD, as USB2 requires cpu time and so never really gets up to its advertised 480Mbit/sec.

[Darwock]

OK, my laptop does support booting from USB and/or firewire. I used seagate disc wizard (on my desktop machine) to make a new hdd into a new boot partition and then fitted this drive into an external caddy.

Attached it to the laptop, selected USB boot device, and it started loading windows 2000. Yay! Then it stopped saying 'boot device inaccessible'. ><

Any ideas?