[scalleia]

Hi I am new to Mac. I have an iMac with a 250gig internal hard drive and a 500g Firewire 800 external drive (LaCie). I have Bootcamp and parallels running and have had to partition the internal drive to store Windows, My question is can I store and run applications from the external hard drive. I am worried that my internal drive will get short of space quickly, hence the external, however I was told by a technician that all applications should be stored and run from the internal drive as the OS needs to store some additional information on the internal drive we installing the application, and therefor storing them on an external drive may lead to some potential stability problems ? is this correct ? Do others store and run apps from external drives ? Thanks.

[clairejr]

Many applications can be stored on an external drive and run from there. I wouldn't move any of the Mac OS X Applications (Mail, Safari, iChat, etc.) but most third party applications can be placed anywhere on the drive, including on an external drive. If the application comes with an installer, check with the manufacturer's website or help files to see if the program has to be placed in the Applications folder of the main drive.

Claire

[TETENAL]

Claire is absolutely right. Generally, any OS X application can be run from anywhere, including external drives. If an application stores additional stuff in one of the /Library folders this will be on the internal drive, but for the app it doesn't matter that it is on an external drive.

Just two things to remember:

1) Apple uses dumb installers. If you move one of Apple's apps, software update will no longer work properly. So avoid moving Apple applications.
2) If an app provides Services (the commands you see in the <Application name>->Services menu) then it needs to be in the /Applications folder or the Service will not be found by the system. If you don't care about an app's Service you can move it around at will of course.

[scalleia]

Thanks for that. It seems that some say it shouldn't be done and others say it's OK. My guess is that it's OK. Cheers.