How to add an external drive

[Paul Coulombe]

Hello, I bought an Seagate 2K USB external drive because my HP computer warned me I was running out of hard drive memory on a genealogy program I was working on.
I plugged in, which is all I had to do, according to instructions. It seemed to install as something came up saying it was being automatically installed.
1) Is this external drive working? How can I be sure it is installed? The computer hard drive still warns me I am short of memory when I work on my genealogy program.
2) Is it possible to move the genealogy program in C drive to this external drive?

 

[Saga Lout]

Hello and welcome to Tom's Hardware Forums.

Your new drive should show up in My Computer as drive D:\ or perhaps F:\, depending on the number of CD drives you have.

You can't simply move a programme but you can move all your personal files - pictures, music, etc and the data that refers to your genealogy work to free up some space on the system disk so XP can work better.

Other space saving tips are to go into the Windows folder, click the Tools menu then Folder Options then View and tick to "Show hidden files and folders" then untick "Hide protected system files" then delete all the files in blue with $ symbols at the front of the filename. There may be as many as 150. Then navigate to the Windows\Software Distribution\Downloads folder, choose Select All from the Edit menu and then press the Delete key. Do the same in the Event cache folder.

Finally, go to http://www.piriform.com and download CCleaner and http://www.atribune.org and download ATF Cleaner. Both will find and delete files the other misses and you will clear out the Recycle bin at the same time. You might get as much as 4 to 5Gb in these exercises.