I have a 3-4 year old Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop. I installed a new program this weekend and noticed that the hard drive capacity appears to be down to about 1/7th of total capacity. I'm not interested in replacing it, as it works fine for my family's needs, but I would like to ensure that I maintain adequate storage space, as we take a lot of photos and videos of my 4 and 2 year olds, plus we're expecting our third child in January.

I'm a total computer dunce, so I'd like to know what I can do to increase my storage space by a meaningful amount. I'm NOT interested in fooling around with the machine, so I'm guessing that an external drive is my only option for sizeable storage space. Is that right?

If so, what size should I seek and where should I make the purchase? If I buy an external hard drive, is installation "plug & play" (in other words, easy)? Could I move various, storage-eating programs to the external drive, or am I better off moving data, video and pictures to the external drive? I assume that the machine would read and execute programs on the C drive better and faster than from an external source, but maybe I'm wrong.

I'm just looking for a way to add storage space as well as backstop the photos and videos and some other family data. Sorry if this is a ridiculously basic question, but I figured the FT family would be a good and reliable source for information.