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Will adding an external hard drive speed up a computer?

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My sister has an older computer and it has a very small Hard drive, she only has 500 Mb's free on it so you can imagine how slow it is. I am wondering if she adds an external hard drive will it help speed up the computer? Thanks.

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No itll slow it down because of USB usage
Report (0) (0) | earlier
It might help as long as she moves file from the computer to the external drive, however, a cheaper option would be to buy a bigger hard drive.
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No it wont. The hard drive is pretty much only used for storage. Have more room to store files and such will not speed up the computer.
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No I am  sorry to say do not waste your money

Ram is what makes your computer run faster  & your processor.

So chances are if her hard drive is that small her processor is slow and it has very little Ram.  Just an older model not to much to be done about it


Report (0) (0) |   earlier
adding an external harddrive will only give you a place to put extra files and backup ur programs. if you want to make your comouter faster, add some RAM if you don't know how to do that, RAM stands for random access memory and it comes as a little card that you can buy from any good electronics store, there are slots inside the computer that this will fit into and if judging from the fact that you had to ask this question, i reccomend that you have geek squad help you
Report (0) (0) | earlier
Possibly, considering it is a virtual memory problem but I really would consider getting more ram too. She will need more space so getting a bigger hard drive would might be your immediate concern. Only get a external hard drive if you absolutely need to because they are prone to failing quicker. Also, one thing to keep in mind is to keep the page file on the operating system hard drive because if you put the page file on external it will fail quickly. Good luck.
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No, it will only make the amount of memory increase
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. 500MB is very small amount.. so your pagefile ( which is part of your hard drive used like extra memory) is dealing with that small space. Delete some unneeded stuff and it should speed back up. If you can't, then buy another hard drive to store the stuff you have on that drive so you can use the main one for windows and the pagefile. Extra memory or RAM would be good also. That would speed it up much more, but you still need the pagefile space.
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Not really, but it will give you more space to save things.
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no that will only add memory to the computer.
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if you only have 500mb of storage left, I would get an external hard drive and move some stuff onto it. This will give more space for virtual memory and might speed it up a little, but since its an older computer there are probably other factors slowing it down.

If you really want to get its original speed back, you should reinstall windows. You may not even need to get an external hard drive because youll probably clean out a whole bunch of junk that you didnt even know you had, which means that you probably wont miss it. Its like spring cleaning for XP.

The idea is to start over. To do that, just stick in the OS cd, boot from it, and follow the instructions for reinstalling. However, make sure you delete your existing partition, and make a new one in its place. That way it will truly erase everything. Just make sure that you have saved all of your stuff that you want to keep somewhere else, because theres no going back.

I would at least try this before spending money on hardware upgrades.
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yeah it would, but if the computers that old, its prolly a better investment to get another comp, there not that much now a days lol
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no cause it will be the same

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U SHOULD DLETE WAT U DONT WANT ON IT LIKE PROGS.. DELETE COOKIES/TEMP FILES.. DEFRAG IT.. U DONT NEED PROGS TO BE AT START UP THEY SLOW IT DOWN LOTS
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Before upgrade your hardware,I suggest you try to optimize your system.May be it can do some help.You can take System Speedup Wizard for trial.It is just one click to do.Easy to use.
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Nope!
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It will not speed up the computer very much.

500mb does not leave much for virtual memory to be used by the OS, but you will not notice a huge increase there.

Best way to do it, is to buy more RAM for the PC
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