It is generally advisable not to keep photos on the local drive containing your photo editing programs. Keep them on a separate drive where the software will be able to access them. Yes, this means that you will have to have the external HD connected to your laptop in order to work on your images. In order to maintain speed, use an eSATA drive, if possible. Obviously, if you are traveling or do not have access to the external drive, you can put image files on the laptop's drive temporarily. If you do not want to go down this road, then move the bulk of your images to an external drive and create space on the local drive for new images.
BTW, you should be backing up your images to another drive on a regular basis. I find that the best way to do this is with a dedicated backup program. The one that I use is Data Backup, but there are other good ones.
Rob
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