Internal/external hard drive question

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Pisces

Yes it is possible, except for your Career profiles and personal settings. Which are hardcoded to be in the SH3 folder in your (My) Documents folder. (You can redirect My Documents to another folder, so also an external drive.)

The performance of the external harddrive is primarily dependant on the way it is connected with your pc. USB connections are slower than eSata. (I presume it is not a network attached storage, which is even slower). Even if you install the game onto this external harddrive, it isn't going to make the CPU load lower. Those applications (required or desired or not) are still going to run in the background until you find a way to disable them (permanently). I don't think SH3 wil run more smoother if it is on an external disk. Most likely file acces is slower. Your best bet is to solve it at the root cause. My suggestion is doing a complete system wipe and re-install XP clean. And then be very carefull of which programs you install on your system. Install options (in popular 'free' software) that silently include useless things like IE-toolbars are one of the things you should be alert to.

If you run MSConfig (included in Windows) and check the Startup tab you get a list of applications that are started automatically at startup. Which ones you do not need is something you'll have to figure out yourself. Some might be critical, some would be handy, and some simply useless. Shortcuts that are placed in the "Startup" folder in your Startmenu are also automatically started up at user logon. (maybe these are also shown in msconfig, I'm not sure) Removing those shortcuts stops them from starting up next time. If you run the services.msc applet of Windows then you can see what services are running in the backgound. Most of them are neccesary services for Windows, so it's a bit risky to disable them. But sometimes you'll find services created by other software that you do not need running constantly. I warn again, messing with them could make your system unworkable. But atleast you should be able to identify them and have some names to look up on the internet about what they do.

Good response....and something I was/and still am considering doing with my new system.