I had my old drive that was in my original HP Pavilion computer. I was told that the drive had crashed about 2 years after I had gotten the computer. Well I just put the drive aside and forgot about it until recently. I hooked it up to the Sabrent 5 in 1 Cable to Serial ATA transfer thing and hooked everything to the drive and then plugged it in to the USB port on the tower of my home built computer. It was recognized and I was able to reformat it. Now I just need to get a new hard drive enclosure.Thanks to Owbist and Terry I was able to do it without having to call my son and bother him with a lot of questions.

I may be wrong, but I think you can only use external drives as main drives if they're SCSI or SATA. If you're dealing with USB devices, they're too slow. Some programs will not install on external drives. I may be misreading Ravencajun's last sentence. If you're looking for an external drive, you want to make sure you get something that is a portable drive. It would probably include all the cables. For a laptop replacement drive, you don't need the cables. What is probably the easiest way to upgrade a laptop hard drive is to get one of these EZupgrade enclosures with a drive. The nice thing about the enclosure is that it will work for either SATA or ATA. It includes software so that you can basically do the image and restore in one step, then just swap drives. Since your laptop is 5 years old and had a 6 gb drive to start, it's probably ATA/IDE/EIDE rather than SATA. You could get something like this with the EZ upgrade for less than $100. You'd put the new drive in the enclosure, run the software to clone the drive, turn everything off, pull the current drive, put in the new one and if all goes well, you can just start right up.

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.

Not up on the easy transfer cable, you might want to investigate the transfer speed... but think you will find it slower than a regular network connection ... Inexpensive network switch and a couple of cat5 patch cables maybe lots quicker. Quick look at newegg I saw a network switch for $9.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833166034 Plain old usb wifi network adapters in ad-hoc mode run 11mbs and newegg and others usually have name brand ones for a wireless connection at $20 each. Sometimes close outs for less.