I realized that my mothers computer only has about 61 MB of space left on her HD and she dosn't even have Office or any sort of anti-virus software loaded! What could I do but buy her an early X-mas gift and get her the external HD she wanted (the machine is older and not upgradable).

Well, I got it all hooked up but when I tried to load Works Suite 2004 onto it (becuase the only version of Office wasn't compatable with her Windows ME operating System) it automatically tries to load to the local disk. I was searching for some sort of manual load on the disk but couldn't find one. Now she has all this space but no way to load it to the E: drive I created for her.

I know I'm forgetting something because I've been on vacation now for a month and a half (yeah, I'm a little bit more than rusty) so if someone could help me think of something to try I'd love to hear it because I don't know what I'd tell her if I went to all this trouble and don't know how to do this. Thank You ;0)

Normally it offers you a choice of Standard/Complete/Custom when installing a program.
Pick the Custom option, where you can change, where to install programs.
Once installed, go into the Tools option of each program and change the Default directory to the new E-drive.

I tried a manual load. It gave me the options of Typical, Custom or Minimal but those only gave you the options of how much to load not where to direct the load to. I have everything on her drive now backed up onto the new drive but I only freed up about 740 MB's of space on the Local disk and this load alone takes over a 1000 MB of space to be able to load in the first place. Once I get it on there I can move it to the other drive but I don't know how to get it on there in the first place. That and I havn't even started on trying the antivirus software yet and she needs that a whole lot more.

Can't you try reinstalling some software that is already installed? Uninstall it from the "Local" disk and then reinstall it hoping that it asks you for the destination.

Try going into a command/DOS session, then go to your CD with Works and see if any parameters show up when you type:
"setup /?" without the quotes.

There might be a setting to let you install somewhere else other than the C- or default-drive.

Thanks, I hadn't thought of that. I'll give it a try and see if that helps ;0)