Before I get a External harddrive

It is not a good idea to install large programs like Office, etc. to an external drive, since they run components all the time. Games will likely lag from an external drive, because of the USB driver overhead.

Make sure you have USB 2 or firewire for an external drive - you will not be pleased with USB 1.1 and an external drive.

it's a supersized memory stick with movable parts, a controller, and a cache ;p

So an external hard drive would be useless to me. After further research, the only thing it does is hold music and documents, stuff I dont care about because I can burn it on a CD-RW , or use a regular memory stick that only cost $40. External hard drives were meant for office/home jobs that require very large individual memory storage.

So in contrast, there are much cheaper alternatives than external hard drives.

eh, for $250 I rather get a 1gig ram upgrade for my Inspiron 8600

eh, external hard-drives offer a good balance of price/gig and speed.  memory sticks are very expensive in that regard and CD's are slow and small.  they also make backups a snap