Running applications from an external drive.

Hi I am new to Mac. I have an iMac with a 250gig internal hard drive and a 500g Firewire 800 external drive (LaCie). I have Bootcamp and parallels running and have had to partition the internal drive to store Windows, My question is can I store and run applications from the external hard drive. I am worried that my internal drive will get short of space quickly, hence the external, however I was told by a technician that all applications should be stored and run from the internal drive as the OS needs to store some additional information on the internal drive we installing the application, and therefor storing them on an external drive may lead to some potential stability problems ? is this correct ? Do others store and run apps from external drives ? Thanks.

Well what the technician told you somewhat true. You might end up with temp. save files and such on you internal drive, which might lead to minor problems. Your best bet would be install programs on your internal, and then use your LaCie for music, videos, pictures, and other save documents. Or if it will always be connected, not used as a portable drive, then you probably won't have any issues at all.

You can run files from an external fine, won't cause any problems. I do it all the time. Not sure if you can run windows files from an external HD though.

I generally agree that you should keep your whole "system" on the main hard drive. That would include OS X and all applications. Then take your "data", your music, videos, files, etc. and if you need to, move them out to an external hard drive.

This is a good organizational setup - your Mac is always whole of and by itself and all that it may be missing if you don't have the external hard drive around is the data you are working with.