External Hard Drives

Can I run software from an external hard drive? I want to use the external so that I can switch computers if I need to.

Welcome to the forum. In general no as any install adds files to c and registers DLL you can run portable software ok. You may get away with it installing to external on one of them do it on another the same so dlls are registered and registry is correct

Humm! How do I do that? I'm fairly new at this but want to learn. Btw, thank you for having me on the forum.

If the software runs without your needing to first install it in Windows, then yes, you can run it from an external hard drive.

I am wanting to run Autodesk Fusion 360 and Autodesk Inventor. I am not sure if these softwares are windows based. I think they are.

You will have to install them before running them. They will work in Windows or on a MAC.

If you install them to the external drive, they will work from there. But then if you move the drive to another computer, you would have to install them again in order to get them to work on the other computer. You would then have problems on the first computer.

If you have only one license, but you are hoping that this will allow you to run that one license on more than one computer, it's not likely to work, because Autodesk software is very thorough in verifying that you are following the requirements of your license. Also, we can't help you with something like that; that would be a violation of forum rules.

mrjimphelps said:

You will have to install them before running them. They will work in Windows or on a MAC.

If you install them to the external drive, they will work from there. But then if you move the drive to another computer, you would have to install them again in order to get them to work on the other computer. You would then have problems on the first computer.

If you have only one license, but you are hoping that this will allow you to run that one license on more than one computer, it's not likely to work, because Autodesk software is very thorough in verifying that you are following the requirements of your license. Also, we can't help you with something like that; that would be a violation of forum rules.

I didn't know that. My license allow me to operate on three computers. Wow, I guess I need to make one computer dedicated to Autodesk. The problem is that I am running PC-DMIS, CMM Manager and the two Autodesk items on one computer and its killing it. The laptop is a Probook 6470b.

Any Autodesk software requires a medium to high performance computer.
Forget all laptops. They are not designed for power computing. They are designed to be portable.

Buy a Unlocked i7 (K), a Z chipset MB, 16 G of fast memory and a small (128G) SSD for Windows and programs and a good HDD for data.
Then you will see the computer waiting for you and not the opposite.

Explain an Unlocked i7 and why not a laptop? I have to be mobile. My job requires it so a desktop for me is useless. My Probooks does well it's just the disk space. However, I do want to upgrade. Can I upgrade my ProBooks? If so, what do you recommend?

Unlocked CPUs can be set to work at higher clocks (when needed).
Power computing (4 cores at 4GHz) generates ~100W or even higher. To take out all the heat you must have a good CPU heat sink. That is only possible on a desktop.
I have seen gaming laptops (with i7) that has only 2 cores. Reason: Power dissipation. That is why you will never have a high end Laptop that gets close to a desktop.

As I suggested, buy a workstation desktop to do the hard work and buy a gaming laptop to have the mobility you need.