External USB Hard Drive for apps.

I have the 8g SSD hard drive. This little computer that I bought for under $400 is still more powerful than a laptop I bought in 1994 for 5 times as much money, not even counting for inflation! That in and of itself says a lot about how great this little machine is. I am more of a computer user and not a techie type person that worries too much about the inner workings of a machine, so I'm sure many of you will think this is a dumb question.

I happen to have had already an exernal hard drive with about 500gb of memory. I have installed a few programs onto the external hard drive to use on the Acer One so I wouldn't clog up the Acer drive with too much stuff. Before I tried this I asked around and some people told me it wouldn't work because you can't use an external hard drive for applications, only for storage of files. They said the registries get all messed up and simply won't run. But so far I've had no problems. I basically just enlarged by about 60x the hard drive of the Acer One just by using an external drive. So far I have had no problems and all the programs are working just fine. So my question is, what am I doing wrong? Howcome it's working when everyone else told me computers don't work this way and you can't run applications from a drive that's not internal?

 

If it works then don't worry about it.

It depends on the individual programs... A lot of program have to run off the C drive, but some can run anywhere.

 

A useful alternative is Mojopac. Basically runs an interface off an external drive, might take some load off the ssd.