Internal hard drive or external hard drive?

I have been using an IBM, T42, laptop for about 4years. The internal, 40, gig, hard drive is about 90% full. I want to install MS Office on my laptop, but I need more hard drive space. Should I get an internal or external hard drive? Can I install an internal, laptop, hard drive by myself or do I need to be qualified? Portability isn't an issue and I think my laptop has about three to four years of life left.

 

The T42 is a 2.5" IDE drive which is becoming increasingly more difficult to find and expensive to replace as well. IBM ThinkPads are relatively easy to replace the drive in.

Hardware Maintenance Manual - ThinkPad T40, T40p, T41, T41p, T42, T42p

It's the 1 screw on the bottom of the chassis from the hard drive caddy and you pull it out. You'll then need to reinstall the OS or clone your existing OS image onto the new drive.

 

Wow! I think my T42 (or was it 43) that I had all through college died 4+ years ago! The CFL backlight went first - I then moved my CPU into an older T41 chassis and used that for ~ a year until it pooped out too.

I would say go for an external drive, if cost and total storage space are factors - as Tsunade said, those IDE drives aren't that cheap, and top out at pretty low capacities. This is also a better solution if you don't want to open the laptop or have to do any OS cloning or reinstalling.

You would probably have to move as much personal data as possible, to allow room on your internal drive for MS Office.

 

In addition to what others have said, you probably could install Office on an external hard drive, as long as you're okay with always having that drive attached if you wish to use Office. I've done that with some IDEs at work, since I can have an external SSD that's much faster than my slow-even-for-a-hard-drive internal HDD.

Side note, how do you get banned with one post? It does seem like an abnormally high amount of people have been banned at NBR in the past few months, for reasons that I'm unsure of, but one post is still impressive. I almost want to know what this alleged "hidden image spam" is so I can learn from it, and if it is so nefarious as to deserve a one-post ban, how to avoid it.

 

Either the hidden image is intended for cookie stuffing or the image is invisible and contains a link to a website that makes it clear it is spam and the spammer is trying to hide the link. We have had an increasing amount of spammers that copy paste questions from this forum or another tech website and then hide spam somewhere in the post. Some hide it very well. Any member here with a posting history will not get a ban if we see something potentially spammy since we know you are not spammers. We have had long time members posting referral links because they simply copied them from another website that allows referrals as an example, in those cases, the referral in the link is simply removed and the person is contacted under the assumption that it was a genuine mistake.

Also, we have had an increasing number of duplicate accounts from one guy who has repeatedly broken the rules every time we ignored him to give him a second chance and that is now an insta ban if we can establish without a doubt that it is that guy.

You don't have anything to fear in those regards Apollo.

 

Thank you tijo.

@Apollo: I suppose I should have left a post explaining it better: This opening post contained a hidden image with a link (concealed by a link shortener) which would take you to a website promoting online deals. The account was created solely for the purpose of spamming, and the question was never genuinely meant, it was written (or copied from somewhere) solely to get past our spam filters and attract members' attention. Sometimes in such cases, the post would be updated after some time (once the new member is off the radar of moderators) to contain a more visible promotional message.

If you could have seen the coding of this post, you would know that this was undoubtedly deliberate, not an unintended mistake by a new member. 4-5 other threads with seemingly innocent questions were created within 1-2 days of this one, also by brand new accounts, with exactly the same hidden image link to that same deal web site. Some of these threads had no responses and were deleted outright. I chose to let this thread stand because it contains some good responses -- even knowing that the spammer who posted the OP is long gone and never cared in the first place.

When I became moderator, one of the most surprising discoveries was the amount and the intricate lengths that spammers go to in order to post here. Members only see a tiny fraction, when a spam post slips through before it is reported or caught. And that is how we want to keep it

As tijo said, regular members have nothing to fear. We would never ban a "real" member for spamming, but rather assume a mistake had occurred and point it out.

 

That's interesting. I see how it could work technically - include a transparent image with a link - but hadn't seen spammers using them before. Thanks for the explanation!

 

We've been playing cat and mouse with spammers for longer than I can remember, they come up with a new crazy spamming scheme that may or may not be brilliant, we figure it out, ban them and they come up with the next crazy thing.

 

Well thank you Dan for keeping us and our systems safe from the spam butts.

But to answer the title's question: internal drives ftw! All external drives are just internal drives in external enclosures. And those external enclosures aren't of the best quality or reliability. Better to just stick with an internal drive if you've got the space.

 

I'm the freshman here when it comes to spam fighting compared to veteran mods like tijo and others.

And with that, thank you radji, for getting us back on the thread topic!