Hey there Mate....

I can answer your questions about the external hard drive you may be purchasing in the near future... I am kinda a computer nerd on both mac and pc... lol See here I told you we could help eachother out in some way or another... I am going to answer your questions in number....

1: no your computer will not run any faster if you get an external hard drive... however if you move all your items to the external drive like photos and music and save them all on there ( it may take longer to download on to your mp3 player) and remove them from the computer harddrive then you'll have more room for your games and the computer may run a little faster...

2:now this question I am not 10 percent sure about... I know my mom bought a huge external drive and ran most of her programs off of it but I think it all depends on the kind of external drive you buy.... I will ask her an replay with the answer later...

3: I think you are going the right way by purchasing an external drive... the other thing besides buying a new computer ( depending on your computer) you can buy more RAM.... the more the better and it depends on your computer and the space you have inside the terminal to put it... If you do that it isn't very hard to make the computer faster and then you can put all your games on the computer and they will be able to run like a charm... you have to remember the problem with vista is that it usually needs a minimum of 2g RAM momory or maybe even 3g but for Vista alone to run optimally is to have more then you will never have trouble running anything with vista so that might be your first buy and then go for the hard drive....

Hope that helped you....:D