wilkes

Buying a laptop with a missing hard drive is NOT a good idea unless you have the skills/knowledge to install one, wholesale price of a hard drive is less than $50 and would increase the selling price much more than the cost. If the seller chose not to repair and then sell the laptop most likely has other issues

I would advise against it.

Yes you most definetly can. Visit my website @ www.mypctechoncall.com. I can set it up for you. I plan on doing this for my next build except I will be using a Solid State Disk for the OS and store my most frequently used programs on my External HDD. Everyone reading this forum needs to be alert that all mechanical moving part HDD are soon to go away. Everything is moving to SSD (Solid State Disks). Mechanical drives are cheap for a reason. They are no longer current technology.

http://www.howtogeek.com/ho...ash-drive/

I'm not a computer guru but I've never really heard of anybody running an operating system (Windows/Linux, etc.) off an external drive. Laptop hard drives can be bought new for less than $40.

An external hard drive would be a mess for a 10 year old to lug around, it'd probably get dropped and screw up.

If I buy a laptop off ebay that doesn't have a hard drive, can I use an external hard drive? I don't want to spend a ton of money on a laptop for a 10 year old.