I ran into something this weekend when working on a friends laptop that resulted from her removing an external hard drive with out properly using the safely remove icon, she told me she only did it 2 or 3 times normally she did use the icon. And once I looked up the error on google I found many many others that had the same thing happen to them and all of them also had an external hard drive they would attach, from all the info and reading I did that was the cause. What happens is you start to get an invalid drive error message, the one she was getting was invalid drive G:\, any time I tried to go to add remove programs I got that error so could not remove out dated programs, any time I tried to install things it gave that same error, so there was no way to try to update or clean out anything. Could not install or remove due to that error. After researching I found a way to go to the command prompt and type in a substitute code and that would let me remove or install programs however upon reboot it was right back, meaning anytime she needs to add or remove she will need to do that command prompt code first, and when I looked in My Computer it showed a G: drive it was an exact copy of the C: drive it was a ghost said it had the exact same volume etc. I tried every thing I found online to try to get it to go away including some registry edits but on hers the registry items were not changed so I could not edit it. So if you do use an external hard drive and you see that you can not safely remove I HIGHLY recommend just wait till you can shut down if that is how you have to do it because you really do not want to have to deal with that ghost drive mess. for those interested the exact error was Error 1327 Invalid Drive G:\ and to make matters worse on her pc everywhere it showed the G: drive it was grayed so there was no way to change that drive letter itself back to C. Really strange but by the google search not very rare.

the thing I am worried about is the fact you said it Sounds old if this sound is coming from the tower it could well be coming from the hard drive and if a hard drive is making sounds it did not make when new it can be an indicator of a drive that is on it's way to failing. I would try running some of the programs that test the health of your hard drive and see what you get. I am sure you did not mean 2Mb of Ram perhaps 2 Gig? Hard drives are not terribly expensive and they are pretty easy to install, just depends really on what you want to put into an older machine. It would be an excellent candidate to load linux on and learn a new OS. But first you need to learn of the health of that drive and definitely do housekeeping on it no matter what you do. When was the last time you opened that case and cleaned out the dust bunnies? Dust bunnies can often be the reason things fail due to the heat caused and them getting stuck in fans which makes new noises too. Cleaning the computer and its components belarc has a hard drive health test Belarc HD Tune look for the free version not the pro

Typically the slightly fancier (read expensive) external hard drives come with more comprehensive software. That's not to say, you couldn't back-up manually, use Window's back-up software, or find some freeware that will accomplish the same thing. I would suggest sticking to drives made by Western Digital or Seagate. They seem to have the best track record for reliability. A second, off-site, backup plan is a better plan. While an external drive will be helpful in case of a hardware it won't help in the of something like a fire. There are online options or you could, depending on the size of your back-up, burn DVDs and put them in a safety deposit box or send them to a trusted relative or friend.

Do you need to copy and paste things on the external HD? I shouldn't think so. Apart from the automatic backing up we have it set to do, if there is any individual file or folder we want to put on it, we simply left click on the file's or folder's icon and drag it to the icon for the external HD and it gets copied there. We installed the entire Oxford English Dictionary program on my husband's computer's external HD and it works fine, but a couple of other programs just wouldn't run right when we tried to install them on it. Come to think of it, the OED has a verification process by which you have to show the computer that you actually possess the CDs for it, and that may be why the company doesn't mind which drive you keep it on. We haven't tried downloading any programs to the ext. HD yet, but it seems likely to me that many--especially the expensive programs that don't provide for periodically proving that you have the CDs--will very likely not run well from there. However, from what Cboy writes, with the help of Acronis, it looks like you can backup the whole of your internal HD, which would include programs. So, being new to external HDs myself (a 500GB Maxtor One Touch 4), I'd like to ask Cboy if you can actually remove programs from C:\ (to save space) and then run them from the external drive instead, or if what Acronis does is only to save them so you can reinstall them in C:\ after a disaster and run them from there.