Hi Everyone,
I recently purchased a Verbatim portable hard-drive (320Gb) thinking how I could back-up files and folders on to it. I've certainly been able to do this task and without any problems but, and I'm probably mistaken about this, I had, as well as storage, wanted to be able to put some PC-Games on it and keep them there and then when I wanted to play them I thought I would be able to play them from this new hard-drive. What is impossible for me is to get the full game-program off the computer and onto the hard-drive - all I seem to get is the Shortcut. Is this all I can expect ? I feel my computer (its a laptop actually) is bogged down with all these games and its slow and sluggish no matter what I do (I've recently bought a Registry cleaner, and I've defragged the whole thing, and I've deleted any Temp Internet files and cookies etc - thought all of this would help, but the results have been negligible really). Then I hit on the idea of transferring all the games I've loaded onto the laptop across onto the hard-drive and to play them from there - but like I said earlier, I can't get the whole program to transfer, and even then I don't know if the game would play from the portable hard-drive or not ?

Another problem I've had is that the new gadget is a plug and play one, which is absolutely brilliant for someone like me, but I noted that after I'd plugged it in to try to load the games which didn't work correctly, I wandered off onto putting myself online for a while. I'd not been online for five minutes before I was told there was a fault and tha the portable hard-drive would have to close. Should this happen do you think, or not ? At the moment its sitting on my desk unplugged........and for all I know completely useless to me, for the task I wanted if for (transferring and playing Games rather than storing them on the Laptop).

Please can anyone help with any advice on either of these matters.

Regards,

Jaydee

If I understand correctly what you are saying, you've installed the games on your laptop hard drive as a normal installation, and you are trying to copy the game over to your external hard drive.

If thats the case, it wont work because when you install a game or any program, the registry is updated to tell windows where the program is located and how to load it when needed. So as soon as you move all the game files over to the external hard drive, the registry is pointing to the original location and windows can't load the game.

It is possible to install a game or program when you run the installtion to another drive. So when it asks to install to C:\, you can usually alter it to install to another drive such as D:\ (you'll probably need to select the custom install when you run the installation to do this).

Whether it would run properly from a external hard drive, I don't know. An external hard drive doesn't normally run as quick as an internal hard drive so the game might not run properly, thats if you can get the game to install at all.

External hard drive are excellent for backing up your data and are not really meant for program installs.

Thanks Mart. I hadn't realised the portable hard-drive couldn't be used in the way I wanted it to be.
Never mind - I've just got myself a whole lot more Storage space I guess !!

Thanks for your help.

Jaydee.