I'm not sure how to explain this properly, but i have a freeagent driver and i want to make it my main drive?
You know how you have your local disk C: normally, where all your stuff is saved. well mine on my desktop has 40 GB (my PC is 5 years old, and still has Windows XP so it runs kinda slow) and this freeagent driver has 500 GB, and I would really like to switch to that. Is there any way I could do this?
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I beat you Coogan. I got the first answer. Yes, it is possible to boot off that drive, but I will leave it up to Coogan to let you know how.
You can do a clean install of XP on the free agent, you will have to remove it from the case. Your computer must support SATA(new drives use this interface), if it is PATA only(which will be ribbon cable a few inches thick) then you’re out of luck. Also, you could clone your drive, have 2 partitions on the free agent and put it on the drive. A clean install is always better anyways.
If you look after your current drive properly, you won’t need the extra space – copy all the stuff you want to keep from My Documents to your freeagent, then delete the contents of My Documents. Empty the recycle bin and defrag your C: drive. You should see a decent performance boost.
Reinstalling an OS should be a last resort option. Performance will decrease the longer it has been since you last did an install (allegedly), but you stand the chance of losing something forever that you really need by doing it. The best thing to do is look after your OS properly.
XP shouldn’t be making your machine slow, if it has 1GB or more.
The common drags on old computers I see are
—Extra unnecessary programs, toolbars, utilities
—Slow 5400 RPM hard drives
—Nearly full (90% or more) hard drives
—Too little RAM
1)
Move your data (My Documents, music, video, etc) to the external drive.
Moving your data off C:\ is a wonderful thing. You can wipe out your operating systemt or clean install a new one without losing your files.
On my machine I have Vista, Win7 and Windows Server 2008 and they all share the same ‘My Documents’ folder.
2)
Run CC Cleaner, remove any unnecessary programs and defrag C:
3)
Re-install Windows if
Links
How to Change the Default Location of the My Documents Folder
http://www.ccleaner.com/
Above I meant to write, “3) Re-install Windows if it’s still slow or messing with the OS interests you”
If it were me, I would move/back-up your current local drive to the external HDD, then do a fresh install of OEM OS and using the C-drive solely for the OS. All programs would be installed on external drive and data served on it as well. Besides, with a 5-year old PC, original HD’s risk of failing in increased. Keeping data from this drive will enable you to afford losing the drive without worries for the data
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