What operating system are you using? According to the manual linked below this program is good for W98 through XP. It even suggests it needs VGA with Vesa - good grief Vesa was almost outdated when Noah left the Ark it seems. Check out this link. The thread is about external drives and there are links to free image creating software. Here is a link that might be useful: PC Clone EX Lite manual

what do you need to know? If it is installed and it shows up on your computer in the list of available drives then you just choose the files you want to move to it and either drag and drop them or right click them and choose copy to or move to and select the drive letter associated with the external drive. It should have come with some type of instructions, if not you can probably go to the western site and look up your model number and find the manual in pdf form.

no you could not use the OS part of your old one when putting it on the latest OS version only on the same OS, if you felt that your pc may soon crash or something and you would want to just put it back exactly as it is then you could use a program that would basically clone that drive including the Operating system and all, a snapshot in time of exactly how it is when you do the image save. There are some good free programs for doing that and it is pretty easy to do. If you choose to just save your data that can be done too, just drag and drop the folders you want to save onto a flash drive or DVD's or an external drive. Usually that would be any documents, pictures, music, videos, bookmarks and profiles, possibly email, etc that you would want to transfer to your new pc or just keep stored and safe. this article has a lot of info on various types of backup What Files Should You Backup On Your Windows PC? Top 10 Files to Backup one of the free imaging programs Macrium Reflect FREE Edition

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.