what to transfer to external hard drive (and how)?

I'm running XP on a rather elderly p.c. - (IBM PC 300 GL - not antedeluvian but no spring chicken either). Given that it has just a 10 gig HD, it ought not have come as too much of a suprise when I realised that I was running into HD capacity problems about three months ago. I bought a 320 gig external drive which now houses all my pics, graphics, docs etc, but again I'm down to 400 meg on the internal.

I'd like to relocate most of the programs folder over to the external drive and just leave the operating system on the machine, but I'd like the system to be able to find them when I've done it.

Is this sensible or even feasible?

What steps and safeguards would I need to take?

 

If you want to install all non-windows programs on a different drive, go to Start > Run, type regedit, press Enter and navigate to registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion. In the right pane, right-click ProgramFilesDir and Modify it to the drive of your choice, e.g. D:\Program Files which will put all new programs on the D drive.

If you want to move existing programs to another drive you will have to uninstall them from C: and then reinstall them after making the registry change above. You will, of course, need the CDs to reinstall the programs.