External hard drive any ideas welcome please

TaBunny

Hi there, my cpu is only 35gig, I bought it 18months ago and thought that would be fine as our old one was only 20 gig and we never filled it. Well my daughter has been doing loads of biology work at uni and has downloaded loads of music from sites etc and anyway now the computer is running quite slow and we only have 2 gig of space left. Someone suggested I get an external hard drive to back up and store lots of stuff we don't use too often and I think this is a good idea but I wanted to know if anyone knows what's the cheapest and the best to buy. Cheapest being the most important as I'm skint ha. Oh and no point anyone suggesting I instal a new bigger hard drive internally that would just throw me totally I'm not technical and opening up the cpu scares me. Thanks hope someone can help.

JonnyThunder

Hello bunny,

Here is a link to MicroDirect who supply all sorts of external harddisks....

Ext. Harddisks

You can also find them at places like Maplin Electronics a little cheaper than most larger stores.

cledor

PC World are selling a Freecom 400GB External Drive for £79.99 seems to be good value. See http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/620543

Chippy_Minton

Download and run https://www.ccleaner.com to free up disk space.

Look at http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/search/?qfind=external+drive for external drives - cheapest is about £47.

Dead_Eye_Jones

Id try

maplin

or

dabs.com

eg:
Solve your limited storage situation for under £60! Seagate 320GB hard drive

External drive, neatly styled and conveniently designed
Huge 320GB capacity
Fast data transfer


£59.99 inc vat




CPU refers to the processor by the way, this is unrelated to storage. If your daughter is stashing illegal d/ls on your PC id ask her to remove them - its unlikely you will ever get prosecuted but cummon - play the game!

TaBunny

Thanks everyone for your ideas that's great will definately check out maplin as there's one near me. Can someone look at this product I found on unbeatable.com and let me know if it sounds any good for what I'm after thanks. http://www.smalldrives.com/index.php?cPath=22_33_30

TaBunny

CPU refers to the processor by the way, this is unrelated to storage. If your daughter is stashing illegal d/ls on your PC id ask her to remove them - its unlikely you will ever get prosecuted but cummon - play the game![/quote]

Oh sorry re the CPU fluff told you I'm a technophobe I stand corrected. My daughter is storing albums downloaded legally from tesco and asda etc mp3 download sites also she has put her whole cd collection onto computer so she could transfer them to her Zen. Also her biology lecturer asked all students to download a 4gib lecturer and essay package so it really used up room on my hard drive. Sorry if you thought we were doing something naughty.

codheadling

hi there,if your pc is running slow an external hard drive wont help as its all the hidden stuff on the main drive thats slowing your system down,my kids do exactly the same,what i did was to buy a pack of 10 rewritable dvds and when the computer starts getting really slow transfer all the music to the dvds and do a reinstall,the pc then runs like brand new and you can put stuff back on and use the disks time and time again,if like me you will find that most of the downloaded music wont be put back on the pc anyway as there is always something better this week,if you google for blank media you can pick a pack of 10 disks up for five or six pound delivered

TaBunny

codheadling wrote: »

hi there,if your pc is running slow an external hard drive wont help as its all the hidden stuff on the main drive thats slowing your system down,my kids do exactly the same,what i did was to buy a pack of 10 rewritable dvds and when the computer starts getting really slow transfer all the music to the dvds and do a reinstall,the pc then runs like brand new and you can put stuff back on and use the disks time and time again,if like me you will find that most of the downloaded music wont be put back on the pc anyway as there is always something better this week,if you google for blank media you can pick a pack of 10 disks up for five or six pound delivered

Hi yeah I have the re writable discs but are you suggesting a complete re installing windows from scratch? This would mean I'd lose loads of data programmes which I don't have instal discs for ie my printer, broadband etc and the last time I had to reinstall windows it took 2 hours and I had 20 sofware programmes to load on afterwards. Not sure I fancy doing that but thanks.

TaBunny

Chippy_Minton wrote: »

Download and run www.ccleaner.com to free up disk space.

quote]

wow that ccleaner is not cheap so think I'll give that a miss thanks anyway good spot

Chippy_Minton

TaBunny wrote: »

wow that ccleaner is not cheap so think I'll give that a miss thanks anyway good spot

You must be clicking on the wrong link as it's completely free. Here's the download page - http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/ - click Download latest version on rhs.