External USB Flash or SSD Drive

[t84a]

Over the past say 5 years, I have had chronic issues with my laptops. I have had primarily Toshiba and now a Lenovo. Its very frustrating not knowing if your PC will boot up on any given day. My Lenovo is only 5 months old and is having problems. It is not virus or malware related. OK, that's as brief a history as you can want.

My question is can I get a 128G 3.0 flash or SSD drive and load my stuff on that drive and run from there? I was initially thinking only data but why not MS Office and Quickbooks as well. This would keep my laptop as generic as possible so I could 1) use one of my old laptops as a spare and 2) a restore would be so much easier and faster and as you can imagine less stressful. I would obviously back up this drive to my WD external hard drive.

I'm looking at http/www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008OE0S56/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

Or

http/www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00G9WHMHM/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

Thanks for reading this and I look forward to the responses.

 

[fricklesmn]

Applications like MS office and Quickbooks need to be installed on the computer it is used on, meaning they are not Portable applications. You can definitely keep your data on there, and should. Where 1 backup is good, 2 is even better (USB Flash/SSD and WD External HD)

 

[t84a]

Why wouldn't programs like Office and Quickbooks run off the external drive? I mean a drive is a drive, isn't it? The external drive would be dedicated to one machine, not shared.

 

[fricklesmn]

Yes you could install MS office and quickbooks to a removable device, but as you said in your original post, if main laptop isnt working you wanted to be able to use a spare. MS office and quickbooks wouldn't start correctly from the External Drive as the registry and system files wouldn't be on 2nd notebook unless those programs were installed locally on the 2nd laptops hard drive/ssd - hope that makes sense

 

[t84a]

Thanks for the reply. Given that I now would load software on the internal HD, do you think I could get away with the USB flash drive?