I have salvaged a 400gig hard drive from my PC tower and bought a case and power supply for it so it now plugs into my laptop as an external hard drive.

I still have all the XP OS on the hard drive and loads of applications such as Office 2007 etc. Is it possible to run the applications from the external drive? I can't seem to do it just now. Also am I better off just getting rid of the XP on the external HD and using it as storage?

And can I install new Apps to the external HD and run them from there or not?

You won't be able to runs apps such as Office from it at the moment, no. That's because the registry on the copy of Windows you're running now doesn't know where to look for certain bits of the install.

You'll have to re-install applications. But they can be re-installed onto the ext hard drive, yes. Windows won't mind which drive they're installed on, as long as it can access it.

HTH,

Steve

Best you could maybe do is a dual-boot setup, but I don't even know if XP supports it, and it's probably not worth the bother anyway... Is there any reason why the old HDD isn't in the new PC case, by the way?

You would have to re-install the apps to run from the external HDD... BUT it will throw errors if you try to use lappy without teh drive plugged in... office especially likes to knit itself quite tightly into windows so it calls parts of it even on bootup

Thanks for the replies. It's only a temporary measure until I get a new tower, then I'll be putting it back inside it's little home. And the Missus can have her laptop back.

boot from the USB drive?