Running Programs from External Hard Drive

I have an Inspiron 1200 laptop and I bought an external hard-drive. I am interested in dumping some programs (such as dreamweaver and paint shop pro) onto the external hd to open up some room on my internal hd. However, i have discovered that my computer will automatically set up all programs to run from my internal hd.

Is there any way around this? I do not have the money to buy a new laptop and I have already added as much memory to it as possible. I use these programs frequently so I cannot just get rid of them.

Thanks

 

Try dumping them, literally. Most portable programs are just already installed programs that have been copied as the Directory. So copy the directories for photoshop and dreamweaver to the external drive, then rename the original directories temporarily so they will no longer be seen by their shortcuts (OldPhotoshop > OldDreamweaver). Now one at a time click on the shortcuts in your start menu or desktop and when it says "hey I can't find it" point it to the new directory on the external drive. After you have all the shortcuts redirected and everything is working ok just delete the OldPhotohop and OldDeamweaver directories. If you want to uninstall them later, you can recopy over from the external before hand so that all the files are there but the shortcuts will probably have to be deleted manually. When I do this I create a Program Files directory on my other drive so I can install programs just by changing C to D (C:/Program File > D:/Program Files) but I do this on a desktop PC and it will let me install to other drives.

By the way, I recently formated my C drive so I could install a fresh copy of XP with SP3 integrated, and all my games had been installed to my D drive. Just for the heck of it I tryed playing some games without reinstalling them and they all play fine even though there are no files or registry entries on the C drive for them (they do all have nocd fixes though). So I don't see why it would not work for you.